Transcript Methods in Context questionnaires

Methods in Context
Using questionnaires to
investigate education
Sociologists sometimes use questionnaires
to study issues such as:
• Subject and university choice
• Bullying and the experience of schooling
• Achievement and school factors
• Parental attitudes to education
Operationlisation of concepts
• Pupils grasp of abstract concepts such as
‘deferred gratification’ is generally less
than that of adults
• This may produce answers that are based
on a misunderstanding of what the
questions mean
Samples and Sampling frames
• Schools routinely keep lists of pupils, staff
and parents. These can provide accurate
sampling frames from which the
sociologist can draw a representative
sample
• However even where the relevant
sampling frame does exist, gaining access
to such confidential information may pose
practical problems
Access and response rate
• Schools may be reluctant to allow researchers to
distribute questionnaires because of the
disruption to lessons or because they object to
the chosen topic
• Response rates in school tend to be quite high
because the head might authorise time out for
the questionnaire to be completed and because
pupils, teachers and parents are accustomed to
completing questionnaires
• However teachers are often too busy to
complete lengthy questionnaires
Practical issues
• Questionnaires are very useful for gathering
large quantities of basic educational information
quickly for example Michael Rutter (1979) used
questionnaires to collect large quantities of data
from 12 London secondary schools. From this,
he was able to correlate achievement,
attendance, and behaviour with variables such
as school size, class size and number of staff
• Children generally have a shorter attention span
than adults and so questionnaires need to be
relatively brief
Anonymity and detachment
• Questionnaires can be useful when researching
sensitive issues like bullying, response rates
may be higher and pupils may be more likely to
reveal details of their experience of being bullied
• Interpretivist sociologists would reject this
because the lack of contact with respondents
may make rapport more difficult to establish
• Questionnaires are official looking documents
and young people might equate them with
school and teacher authority. As a result some
pupils may refuse to cooperate