EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT DOCS & STATS

Question 1

Positivists (Official Statistics, Practical and Reliability Advantages)-

Answer 1

• Data from official statistics has already been collected and published, which saves the sociologists time and money.
• For example, the government collects statistics on over 30,000 primary and 4,000 secondary schools, which is a highly representative sample which would be impossible for a researcher to acquire.
• This collection of statistics allows sociologists to make comparisons between the achievements of different social groups based on characteristics like class, gender, or ethnicity, helping in generating/ backing up a hypothesis.
• These hypothesis can also be tested and re-tested, especially since the government imposes standard definitions and categories to be followed, which may aid in discovering cause-and-effect relationships
• (e.g. a sociologist may look at statistics on exam results across social classes and conclude that poverty causes under-achievement). Educational statistics also allows sociologists to easily make comparisons over time as they are collected at regular and frequent intervals, like how annually exam statistics are gathered, which can help to reveal trends. Governments also often gather statistics to monitor the effectiveness of their educational policies, like those dealing with the curriculum, or subject choice and achievement inequality, which can help in sociologists’ research.

Question 2

Eval (Official Statistics, Practical and Reliability Disadvantages)-

Answer 2

• Governments often only collect statistics for their own policy purposes, which could be out of line with data needed by a sociologist (e.g. if a sociologist wanted to look at the relationship between language, class, and achievement, they’d struggle as there’s no official statistic on this).
• Definitions may change between the state and a researcher too- the official definition of pupils’ social class is based on parental income, but a Marxist sociologist might define social class based on property ownership.
• Definitions may also be unreliable as they change overtime, like when the Conservatives first introduced league tables of schools performances in 1988, which based a school’s position on just exam results, that was later changed in 2006 by the Labour government who introduced a new measure of school performance called Contextual Value Added (CVA) which also looked into the levels of deprivation of pupils, changing educational statistics.
• Also statistics on class may be less valid as stigma and peer group bullying could cause working-class pupils to not claim free school means, which is used to measure social class.
• Not only this but not all working-class pupils qualify for free school meals, and not all people who qualify for free school meals are working-class (e.g. lower-middle class pupils from large families).

Question 3

Gillborn (Documents, Practical and Representative Advantages)-

Answer 3

• Public documents are easily accessible, and partly because of government policies emphasising parental choice, schools make a large amount of information available to the public, which researchers can use.
• In Gillborn’s study of racism and schooling, he was able to access a wide range of school documents, including school policy statements, local authority guidelines on anti-racism, and the minutes of staff meetings.
• Some official documents are legally required of all schools and colleges, like reports on racist incidents, making forming a representative picture of racism in schools across the country more likely.
• These documents helped to give Gillborn the ‘official’ picture of what was happening in terms of racism and anti-racism in the schools he studied, which he used to compare with data that he had collected from interviews and observations, improving his research.

Question 4

Eval (Hey, Personal Documents, Practical and Ethical Disadvantages)-

Answer 4

• Some personal documents are harder to access.
• Hey made use of notes that girls passed to each other in class to understand their friendship patterns, but these notes were often out of sight as the girls learnt to expertly hide these notes from their teachers.
• This study did also pose ethical problems, as although in some cases the girls offered their notes to Hey freely, in other cases Hey collected them from desks at the end of the lesson, and in one case a teacher took the notes out of a wastebin to give to Hey, which undermined informed consent.