Band 8 model answer
A model answer written to illustrate a Band 8 response to this question, with the rubric breakdown and what carries it. Written by us as a teaching example, not a verified exam script.
“People spend less time with extended family. Why is this happening, and is it a positive or negative change?”8
Overall
8
Task response
8
Coherence & cohesion
8
Lexical resource
8
Grammar
In previous generations, regular contact with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins was an ordinary feature of family life. Today, many people have far less interaction with their extended family, and understanding why this has happened, and whether it matters, is a question of genuine social significance.
The primary cause is geographical mobility. As individuals follow employment opportunities, higher education and better living conditions to distant cities or even different countries, the physical proximity that once made extended family gatherings routine becomes logistically difficult. Changing household economics have also played a role: smaller homes in expensive urban areas leave little space to accommodate visiting relatives, and the pace of working life leaves fewer occasions for lengthy family visits. Social changes in the nature of friendship and community, whereby people increasingly invest their social energy in chosen networks of friends and colleagues rather than relatives they did not select, have further reduced the centrality of extended family relationships.
Whether this shift is positive or negative is genuinely debatable. From one perspective, it reflects individual freedom and the expansion of life choices, people are no longer geographically constrained by family obligation and can construct identities and social lives that reflect their genuine preferences. The decline in compulsory proximity also reduces the exposure to family conflict and dysfunction that can accompany enforced closeness.
However, the loss of extended family contact also removes important social resources. Grandparents and other relatives have historically provided informal childcare, emotional support and intergenerational knowledge transfer that formal institutions replicate only poorly and at great cost. Elderly family members, increasingly isolated as contact diminishes, face heightened risks of loneliness and its associated health consequences.
On balance, the trend is mildly negative, because the practical and emotional support functions of extended family networks are difficult to replace.
- •Identifies three distinct causal factors, geographical mobility, housing economics and shifting social preferences.
- •Presents both perspectives genuinely before reaching a clear qualified judgement.
- •The point about informal childcare and intergenerational knowledge transfer adds substantive depth to the negative case.
- •The essay could benefit from a brief concrete illustration in the causes section to make the analysis more vivid.
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