Methods In Context - Usuing Secondary Sources To Investigate Education

Question 1

Secondary sources

Answer 1

• sociologists use secondary sources to study a variety of educational issues. The main secondary sources that they use official statistics and a variety of documents, both personal and public.

Question 2

Using official statistics to investigate education

Answer 2

• education is one of the key services provided by the state and as such is closely monitored. As a result, schools, colleges, local authorities and the department for education collect a wide range of official statistics on education.
• these cover many issues that sociologists are interested in:
• ethnicity, class gender and educational achievement
• school attendance, truancy and inclusion
• league tables, marketisation and school performance
• gender and subject choice

Question 3

Practical issues of using official statistics to investigate education

Answer 3

• much of the data is published and therefore available to the sociologists, saving them both time and money. In practise it would be too costly and time consuming for a sociologist to gather information on so many schools themsleves
• educational statistics allow sociologist to make comparisons between the achievements of different social groups based on ethnicity, gender and social class
• educational statistics are collected at regular and frequent intervals, sociologists can make comparisons over time
• however governments collect statistics for their own policy purposes and these may not be the same as those of sociologists.

Question 4

Representativeness of using official statistics to research education

Answer 4

• some official statistics on education are highly representative. E.g, all state schools have to complete a school census three times a year. This collects information on pupils attendance, ethnicity and gender, the numbers receiving free school meals and so on. Because these statistics cover virtually every pupil in the country, they are highly representative

Question 5

Reliability of using official statistics to research education

Answer 5

• positivists favour official statistics because their reliability means that they can be used to test and re test hypotheses and thus discover cause and effect relationships.
• although it is possible for errors to creep into the production of official statistics on education, they are generally very reliable. This is because the government imposes standard definitions and categories for their collection, which all schools much use. This enables the process to be replicated from year to year, allowing direct comparisons to be made.
• however, governments may change the definitions and categories.

Question 6

Validity of using official statistics in researching education

Answer 6

• interpretivists question the validity of educational statistics. They argues 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, such as parents, teachers and pupils
• schools may manipulate their attendance figures by re defining poor attenders as being on study leave or additional work experience. They may be tempted to do so because, in an education market, there is pressure on schools to present themsleves in the best possible light in order to maintain their funding and parental support. However, this deliberate distorting of attendance figures undermines the validity of educational statistics

Question 7

Using documents to investigate education

Answer 7

• schools, colleges, local authorities and the department of education generate a wide range of public documents. Also, because pupils produce large amounts of paper based work, there is the opportunity for the researcher to use personal educational documents. But these are not the only documents that sociologists can use.
• documents cover many educational issues that sociologists are interested in:
• ethnic, class and gender differences in achievement
• the curriculum
• gender stereotyping in schools books
• racist incidents in schools
• special educational needs

Question 8

Practical issues using documents to investigate education

Answer 8

• public documents on education are often easily accessible partly because of government policies emphasising parental choice, schools make a large amount of information available to the public, which researchers may then use
• e.g in gillborn study of racism and schooling, was able to access wide range of school documents. Gave him the ‘official’ picture of what was happening in terms of racism and anti racism in the schools he studies
• documents can be more difficult to access. Hey made use of the notes girls passed to each other in class to understand their friendship patterns. However, the notes were not always easy to obtain.
• some educational documents are confidential, such as teachers personnel files and pupils disciplinary records; so sociologists may be unable to gain access to them

Question 9

Ethical issues of using documents to investigate education

Answer 9

• there are few ethical concerns with using public documents produced by schools. Having been placed in the public domain by the organisation that produced them, permission for their use is not required
• however, there are more ethical problems with personal documents. E.g, hey collected in the bites that girls had passed to each other in class. In some cases, girls offered her notes freely, but in others hey collected them from desks at the end of the lesson. In one case, a teacher took them from the waste paper bin and offered them to her. Therefore, in some cases informed content for their use has not been obtain

Question 10

Representativeness of using documents to research education

Answer 10

• 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 whole country. However, of course, not all racist documents may be documents
• personal documents are often less represented. E.g, hey collected about 70 noted, but unsystematic way in which she came by them make its likely that her sample was unrepresentative

Question 11

Reliabilty of using documents to investigate education

Answer 11

• many public documents, e.g, 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, deliberate falsification or accidental mistakes made when filling in registers reduced their reliability because teachers are not applying the measure of attendance consistently
• some educational documents can also be used in ways that other researchers can replicate. Further researchers can easily apply systematic content analysis of this kind to create comparative data from educational documents

Question 12

Validity of documents investigating education

Answer 12

• documents can provide important insights into the meanings held by teachers and pupils and can therefore be high in validity. E.g, hey initially examines girls friendships in schools through observation and interviews. Eventually, however she realised that she was ignoring a useful source of insight into girls feelings and actions - the notes
• although teachers considered these notes to be ‘bits of silliness’, hey found that they offered valuable insights into the nature of girls friendships. This is because they were spontaneous expressions of the girls feelings and attitudes
• however, all documents are open to different interpretations. E.g, we cannot be sure that heys interpretation of the meaning of the notes was the same as that of the girls. Also, because the girls sometimes handed the notes after class, it is possible that they were written with her in mind and may not have been spontaneous