GCSE Sociology Exam Questions by Topic

A teenager is caught shoplifting. Their parents ground them and their friends stop inviting them out, and separately the police caution them and a court fines them. Identify which of these responses are examples of formal social control and which are informal, and explain the difference between the two types.

1. Identify the agency responsible for each response: parents and friends are informal agencies; the police and court are formal agencies.
2. Classify the parents grounding the teenager and the friends excluding them as informal social control, since these are unwritten, unofficial sanctions applied by people close to the individual.
3. Classify the police caution and the court fine as formal social control, since both are official, legally defined sanctions imposed by agencies with the power to enforce the law.
4. Explain the underlying difference: informal control relies on social relationships and the desire for approval, while formal control relies on written laws and the state's authority to punish.
5. Link to theory: a functionalist would argue all four responses work together to reinforce the same shared value, that theft is wrong, showing how formal and informal control reinforce rather than replace each other.