OCR AS Level Sociology Paper 2 H180-02 Researching & Understanding Social Inequalities May 2022 QUESTION PAPER QP

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An ethnographic study of the lives of working class young people Simon Winlow and Steve Hall were interested in trying to understand the lives of young working class people, especially some who foll... ow a culture of drink and violence in cities at night. The researchers used an ethnographic approach, involving a combination of unstructured and semi-structured interviews together with observation. Over a period of a year, they interviewed and observed about 40 young people (mostly aged between 18 and 25) in the North East of England. Most of the young people worked in insecure casual jobs and spent much of their leisure time in pubs and clubs in the city centre. Winlow had already made extensive contacts with young people during earlier research, which he had completed in the North East of England. He used these contacts as gatekeepers to enable him and his colleague to access wider friendship groups. They also recruited other interviewees whenever the opportunity arose during the course of their observation. The researchers wanted to avoid imposing their own ideas or explanations onto the experiences of the young people they studied, so tried to adopt an approach to interviewing which encouraged young people to talk as naturally as possible about their everyday lives with as little prompting as possible. Rather than starting with a definite hypothesis the researchers preferred to allow the findings to develop the direction of the research. Interviews were carried out in a wide range of settings, including respondents’ flats or their parents’ homes, pubs, cafes and even in a car. The data collected from their observations helped to provide context for the interview data. Despite Winlow and Hall trying to avoid imposing their own views on the findings, they acknowledge that the selection of data from the large amount available in their interview transcripts was based on their personal choices. Their largely qualitative data describes city nightlife in some detail, providing a vivid and sometimes shocking account. For example, they use accounts of both victims and perpetrators of violence to give an insight into the type of experience encountered by young people on nights out. Winlow and Hall conclude that changes in society caused by capitalism are causing the drink and violence culture. They suggest that a loss of men’s clear breadwinner role, due to a lack of steady jobs, meant for some males their lives lacked meaning compared to males in previous generations. Most of the young people worked in jobs they hated just for the money, finding escape in drinking alcohol with friends in city centre bars and pubs. Violence seemed to be accepted as inevitable because of high alcohol consumption and, if anything, rather than putting young people off from going out provided an ‘edge’ which was part of the attraction of nightlife [Show More]

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