Transcript Methods in Context Sec Data

Methods in Context
Using secondary sources to
investigate education
Examples of documents
in education
Public
• School websites
• Dfes guidance to schools
• School prospectuses
• Government enquiries
• Novels about school life
• School textbooks
• Playground songs and games
• Media reports, films about
education
• Ofsted inspection reports
Private
•Pupil’s written work
•School reports
•Pupils and teacher’s diaries
•Pupils and teacher’s
autobiographies
•Graffiti on school
buildings, desks
•Notes passed in lessons
•Absence letters
•Text messages between
pupils
Using official statistics
to investigate education
• Practical issues- much of this data is published
and thus available to the sociologist, saving both
time and money
• Statistics allow sociologists to make comparisons
between different groups and also over time
• However governments collect statistics for their
own purposes which may not be relevant to the
sociologist
• Government definitions of key concepts may
differ to that of the sociologist
• Representativeness- All state
schools have to complete a school
census every 3 years, because these
statistics cover every pupil in the
country they are highly
representative
• Reliability- Positivists favour official statistics
because their reliability means they can be used
to test and retest hypotheses
• However, governments may change definitions and
categories, e.g. when the conservatives brought in
league tables they were solely based on exam
results, in 2006 Labour brought in CVA which
takes into account exam results and also the level
of deprivation pupils suffer
• Validity- Interpretivists question the
validity of statistics. They argue that such
statistics are socially constructed. E.g.
they see truancy statistics as the outcome
of a series of definitions and decisions
made by a variety of social actors
• Do schools deliberately distort their
figures?
Using documents to
investigate education
• Practical issues- Public documents on education
are often easily accessible to the researcher. For
example, David Gillborn (1995) in his study of
racism and schooling was able to access a wide
range of school documents
• Personal documents can be more difficult to
access. Valerie Hey (1997) made use of the notes
girls passed to each other, however girls were
experts at hiding them from their teachers
• Ethical issues- Few ethical concerns with
public documents, however there are some
concerns with personal documents. For
example with Hey, in some cases the notes
were offered freely but in others she took
them out of the waste paper bin so
informed consent was not obtained
• Representativeness- Some official
documents are legally required of all
schools and colleges, such as records of
racist incidents. This makes it more likely
that we can form a representative picture
of racism in schools across the land.
However, of course, not all racist incidents
may be documented
• Reliability- Many public documents, for
example attendance registers, are
produced in a systematic format. This
enables researchers to make direct
comparisons of the absence rates of pupils
in different schools
• However mistakes when filling in registers
may reduce their reliability because
teachers are not applying the measure of
attendance consistently
• Validity- Documents can provide important
insights into the meanings held by teachers and
pupils and can therefore be high in validity. Hey
found that the notes offered valuable insights
into girl’s feelings and actions
• However all documents are open to interpretation.
For example, we cannot be sure that Hey’s
interpretation of the meanings of the notes was
the same as that of the girls
Task p-g 226-228
Create a Power Point on the issues
surrounding using secondary sources
to investigate education
• Official statistics
• Documents