Teacher License – Sociology Complete Review Guide 2026–2027

4. Merton's five adaptations: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion.
5. Sutherland's differential association: criminal behaviour is learned through interaction in close groups.
6. Becker's labelling theory: deviance is a label society attaches to an act, and the label can push a person into further deviance.
7. Hirschi's four social bonds are attachment, commitment, involvement and belief; weak bonds make deviance more likely.
8. The nuclear family is a couple and their unmarried children; the extended family spans more than one generation.
9. Endogamy is marriage within the group; exogamy is marriage outside it.
10. Agents of socialisation: the family, school, peer group, mosque and the media.
11. Push factors drive people out, such as poverty, unemployment and disasters; pull factors draw them in, such as jobs and education.

Common mistakes in this chapter

• ✕ Treating all change as progress: change is a descriptive concept, and calling it progress or decline is a value judgement; even planned change can have unintended effects.
• ✕ Confusing modernisation and dependency: modernisation traces underdevelopment to internal factors, dependency to the periphery's tie to the core.
• ✕ Crediting the Hawthorne studies to scientific management: they founded the human relations approach that stressed social factors at work.
• ✕ Mixing up Merton's adaptations: innovation accepts the goals but rejects legitimate means, ritualism keeps the means and drops the goals, rebellion rejects both and puts new ones in their place.
• ✕ Placing Lombroso among social explanations: his account of crime is biological, while differential association, labelling and social bond theory are social.
• ✕ Reading a population pyramid: a broad base means high births and a young society; a rectangular shape means low births and low deaths.