Using questionnaires to investigate education: a summary
- Created by: Azia Singh
- Created on: 14-05-16 16:58
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- Using questionnaires to investigate education
- Operationalisation of concepts
- Samples and sampling frames
- Schools routinely keep lists of pupils, staffs and parents, which can provide for sampling frames
- Schools may not keep lists that reflect the researcher's interests
- Schools may deny access to such confidential information
- Schools routinely keep lists of pupils, staffs and parents, which can provide for sampling frames
- Anonymity and detachment
- Questionnaires are formal documents and pupils may equate them with authority. Those in anti-school subcultures may refuse to cooperate or take the activity seriously, resulting in incomplete or invalid data
- Teachers may feel able to set aside concerns about their careers an so give more honest answers to sensitive questions
- Access and response rate
- Schools may be reluctant to allow sociologists to distribute questionnaires because of the disruption to lessons it may cause or rejection of the chosen topic
- Response rates can be higher in schools because teachers and pupils are under pressure to cooperate
- Head may even authorise time to be taken out of lessons to complete the questionnaires
- Parents and teachers are accustomed to completing questionnaires such as student satisfaction surveys
- Both may not have the time
- Practical issues
- Michael Rutter used questionnaires to collect large quantities of data from 12 inner London secondary schools
- Written questionnaires involve participants being able to read and understand them
- Need to be brief because children have short attention spans, which limits the amount of information that can be collected
- Children's life experiences will be narrower so questionnaires may be of little value
- Pupils' grasp of abstract concepts is generally less than that of adults
- May be more difficult to turn sociological ideas into language that they will understand
- Could require the sociologist to over-simplify so much that there ceases to be any sociological value
- Could produce answers that are baed on respondents' misunderstanding
- Operationalisation of concepts
- May be more difficult to turn sociological ideas into language that they will understand
- The questionnaire's purpose may become known thorughout the school long before all the pupils and teachers have been given it
- Teachers may be able to analyse the pattern of questions and recognise the researcher's aims and intentions
- Practical issues
- Michael Rutter used questionnaires to collect large quantities of data from 12 inner London secondary schools
- Written questionnaires involve participants being able to read and understand them
- Need to be brief because children have short attention spans, which limits the amount of information that can be collected
- Children's life experiences will be narrower so questionnaires may be of little value
- Questionnaires can be particularly useful when researching sensitive educational issues because of their anonymity (depending on pupils being assured of this)
- Response rates may be higher and data more valid
- Anonymity and detachment
- Questionnaires are formal documents and pupils may equate them with authority. Those in anti-school subcultures may refuse to cooperate or take the activity seriously, resulting in incomplete or invalid data
- Teachers may feel able to set aside concerns about their careers an so give more honest answers to sensitive questions
- Interpretivists emphasise the importance of developing a rapport and so reject this
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