Community and Family Studies: should I choose it?

Resource Management

Individuals and Groups

Families and Communities

Research Methodology (HSC core, 25%)

This core teaches you to run a piece of social research properly and then judge whether it was done well. You learn to narrow a topic into a research focus and turn it into a hypothesis or research question, plan a project with realistic timelines and resources, and distinguish primary from secondary and print from digital sources. The methods themselves, interviews, observations, questionnaires, case studies and literature reviews, are compared on what each is good for and what each cannot deliver. Sampling covers how a sample group is constructed and why that determines what the results can claim. Ethical practice runs through everything: informed consent, confidentiality, privacy, avoiding bias and research integrity. You then record, analyse and present qualitative and quantitative data, assess validity and reliability, reference sources correctly, and apply all of it to your own Independent Research Project through its plan, diary and product.

Groups in Context (HSC core, 25%)

This core is about specific community groups and what stands between them and having their needs met. You work with prevalence, the range of needs, and access to services, then apply a consistent set of needs, safety and security, health, education, sense of identity, employment and an adequate standard of living, to each group you study. From the 2024 HSC, both Category A groups are mandatory: Youth and Rural and remote families. You also study two Category B groups, chosen from Aged, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, LGBTQIA+ communities, Sole parents, Homeless people, and People with disability. Across all of them you examine formal and informal support, the factors that make services hard to reach, how community attitudes affect a group, the role of advocacy, and strategies that would improve equity.

Parenting and Caring (HSC core, 25%)

This core covers who does the caring and what it costs them. You examine the roles and responsibilities parents and carers take on, and how people prepare for parenthood through health, resources and antenatal care. Parenting styles are studied as a set, democratic, authoritarian, permissive and negligent, along with the effect each has on a dependant. You then look at social parents, step, foster, adoptive, grandparent and same-sex parents among them, and at the personal factors shaping parenting, culture, education, socioeconomic status and gender expectations, alongside societal factors such as legislation and community attitudes. The rest of the core deals with the practicalities and consequences of caring: managing multiple roles and commitments, formal and informal support including respite care, duty of care and the legal rights of children and dependants, and the effects of caring responsibilities on the wellbeing of both carer and dependant.

Family and Societal Interactions (HSC elective option, 25%)

This elective option looks at the structures around a family and how they change as young people gain independence. You study the government and community structures that support families across the lifespan and the legislation that protects the welfare and rights of children and young people, including who is obliged to act under it. Schools and community organisations are examined as support providers in their own right, not just as settings, with attention to what each is realistically able to do. The regulation strand covers the way society staggers the rights and responsibilities young people take on, through driver licensing schemes, compulsory school attendance requirements and restrictions on access to tobacco and alcohol, and asks whether those controls achieve what they intend. Running through the option is the question of how societal expectations shift as a young person moves toward adulthood.

Social Impact of Technology (HSC elective option, 25%)

This elective option examines what technology has done to families and communities, not what it can do. You start with complex technologies and the way knowledge is organised, stored and controlled, then look at entertainment and communication technologies and their effects on interpersonal relationships within families, including changes to how family members spend time together and communicate. Access is treated as a structural issue: geographic access, which separates metropolitan from rural and remote communities, and socioeconomic access, which separates households by income and education. Individual lifestyle is examined through both access to a technology and acceptance of it, since the two are not the same thing. The final strand covers technology's effects on community health across three named areas, food, health and medicine, and transport and travel, each with its own benefits and costs to wellbeing.

Individuals and Work (HSC elective option, 25%)

This elective option deals with paid work and the way it interacts with family life. You examine why individuals enter the workforce, including financial necessity, independence, identity, social contact and career progression, and how patterns of work change across the lifespan and after changes in family circumstances such as the birth of a child, separation, illness or caring for an ageing parent. Managing multiple role expectations is a central theme, including how technology is used to hold work and family commitments together and the ways it blurs the boundary between them. Leave entitlements are studied concretely, alongside workplace equality and the barriers particular groups still face. The final strand looks at workplace structures, the arrangement of hours, supervision, flexibility and support, and how those structures influence employee efficiency and wellbeing.