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Research methods Flashcards

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1
Q

What are the practical issues influencing choice of method?

A
  • Time and money, longitudinal means more expensive
  • Funding bodies, some bodies prefer quantitative changing the research method
  • Personal skills and characteristics
  • Subject matter
  • Research opportunity
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2
Q

What are the ethical issues influencing choice of method?

A
  • Informed consent
  • Anonymity
  • Harm to participants
  • Vulnerable groups
  • Right to withdraw
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3
Q

What are the theoretical issues influencing choice of method?

A
  • Validity
  • Reliability
  • Representativeness
  • Ideological perspective, positivists and interpretervists
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4
Q

What are the factors influencing choice of topic?

A
  • Sociologist perspective, new right, marxist etc
  • Society’s values, Rise of feminism means more research into gender
  • Practical factors, May influence accessibility making it impossible to study some topics
  • Funding bodies, determine the topic as it is providing the funds
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5
Q

What is operationalisation?

A
  • Converting a sociological concept into something we can measure such as looking at those on FSM to see who is working class
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6
Q

What is a pilot study?

A
  • Doing a trial of the main survey to see if it is good enough to be done on a wide scale with a wide sample
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7
Q

What is a sampling frame?

A
  • A document with a list of people that can be used in a study such as the electoral vote and the telephone book
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8
Q

What are some sampling techniques?

A
  • Random sampling, Sample selected by pure chance
  • Systematic sampling, Using every nth name on a sampling frame such as every 5th person
  • Stratified random, of 20% of the population were under 18, 20% of the sample must be under 18
  • Quota sampling, have to fill quotas of specific characteristics such as 20 women
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9
Q

What are the practical reasons it may not be possible to create a representable sample?

A
  • Social characteristics of a population are unkown
  • Might be hard to find or create a sampling frame, example, not all criminals are convicted
  • Respondants may not want to participate especially if they are part of a vulnerable group
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10
Q

What sample methods are used when a re-presentable sample cannot be made or found?

A
  • Snowball sampling, meeting people through other people exponentially
  • Opportunity sampling, choosing individuals who are easy to access
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11
Q

What are the five main groups or settings in education?

A
  • Pupils
  • Teachers
  • Parents
  • Classrooms
  • Schools
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12
Q

What are the differences between researching young people and adults?

A
  • Power and status, young people have less power meaning they find it harder to state their opinions and one to one interviews could reinforce this so informal methods such as group interviews may be better

-Ability and understanding, Pupils understanding skills worse than that of an adult making it hard to gain consent and longer times to explain questions. Pupils may also have worse memories

  • Vulnerability and ethical issues, young people more vulnerable to psychological harm. Personal data should not be kept unless necessary. Due to vulnerability there will be gatekeepers such as teachers, parents and local authorities
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13
Q

What laws and guidelines are there when it comes to researching children?

A
  • Safeguard vulnerable groups act requires researchers to have a DBS check
  • British sociological foundation has ethical research guidelines
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14
Q

What are the key factors in researching teachers?

A
  • Teachers may feel overworked and less liekely to be helpful even when they want to
  • Teachers may also be sympathetic to researcher
  • Power and status, in order to conduct covert research the researcher may have to form a cover of a submissive role such as a TA
  • Impression management, teachers more open to be observed because of processes such as Ofsted but they have practice of putting on an act, head teachers may choose certain teachers to make the school look better and some teachers wont be willing to damage career prospects by answering honestly.
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15
Q

What are the key factors in resarching classrooms?

A
  • Young people are heavily controlled in a classroom meaning it may not reflect what they think and feel
  • Gatekeepers, Access to classrooms controlled by teachers, head teachers and child protection laws
  • Peer groups. young children may be worried about needing to conform and may be easily influenced in answers by peers
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16
Q

What are the key factors researching school?

A
  • Schools’ own data, rich in secondary data due to heavy monitoring but some figures may be falsified to make schools look better
  • The law, it is mandatory for pupils to go to school meaning everyone will be there making for an easy sample but teachers may see research as interfering with education
  • Gatekeepers, head teachers and governers can refuse access to the school because it may affect disciplinne, classroom relationships and children are not competent to judge teachers
  • School organisation, there are hierarchies where resaerchers may be seen as teachers by pupils but observers by teachers and timetables, exam periods and holidays may make it hard to find research time
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17
Q

How can parents affect what goes on in education?

A
  • How they bring up their children
  • Attendance in parents evenings and parent-teacher contacts
  • Marketisation encourage parents to choose schools
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18
Q

What are the key factors in researching parents?

A
  • Class, gender and ethnicity differ affecting their willingness to participate especially with sensitive topics, and may lie to seem better parents
  • Access to parents, Parent child interraction occurs at home meaning it is hard to observe and parents almost exist exclusively outside of school making them hard to reach
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19
Q

What are the two groups in a laboratory experiment?

A
  • The experimental group, received the variable being tested
  • The controlled group, received the variable not being tested
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20
Q

How reliable are laboratory experiments?

A
  • Other scientists can replicate it
  • Original researcher can provide exact steps to follow
  • It is very detached meaning it is not influenced by the researcher
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21
Q

What are the practical problems in laboratory experiments?

A
  • Many extraneous variables cannot be controlled
  • Cannot be used to study the past
  • Only study small samples meaning low representiveness
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22
Q

What are the ethical problems in laboratory experiments?

A
  • Need to contain some degree of deception and some vulnerable groups do not know what they are signing up for
  • Milgram experiment, were told to administer shocks when they got questions wrong. No electric shocks were given but found 65% prepared to use 450 volts on people
  • Harm, three people had a seizure in the millgram experiment
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23
Q

What is the Hawthorne effect?

A
  • When people are aware they are being watched and act differently in order to please the researcher
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24
Q

What is a field experiment?

A
  • Takes place in subjects natural sorroundings rather than a controlled environment
  • No informed consent so no Hawthorne effect
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25
Q

What is the comparative method?

A
  • Identify two groups that are similar except for the variable we are interested in
  • Compare the two groups to see if the different variable has any effect
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26
Q

What is an example of the comparative method?

A
  • Durkheim, suicide. Hypothesised social integration caused less suicide. Compared Protestants and Catholics who were extremely similar.
27
Q

What is an example of a laboratory experiment in education?

A
  • Harvey and Slatin. 96 teachers, 18 photographs of class varying children. Teachers rated lower class children as worse than uper class especially experienced teachers. This shows that labelling theory is true
  • Charkin, 48 uni students taught a tten year old boy, one third told boy was smart, another third told he was dumb. The video showed the people who were told he was smart used better strategies to encourage him
  • Neither experiment used real pupils
28
Q

What are the pros and cons in using field experiments in education?

A

Ethical
- Young people may not understand and be deceived and not properly give informed consent and lead to psychological harm.

Theoretical
- They are artificial and have little ecological validity
- Slatin used photographs instead of real students and Charkin used uni students instead of teachers

Practical
- Schools are more complex and it would be impossible to control all the variables that influence teacher expectation

29
Q

What are some examples of field experiments in education?

A
  • Rosenthall and Jacobson, spurter self fulfulling prophecy.
30
Q

What are the pros and cons of using field studies in education?

A

Ethical
- Requires deception to work such as R and J needing to lie about the spurters test
- 80% of children did not benefit from this experiment and couldve been held back by it

Theoretical
- validity, R and J claimed teacher expectations influenced spurters but they didnt carry out any classroom observations.
- Reliability, repeated 252 times due to simple steps but unique teachers and pupils make it impossible to exactly repeat

31
Q

What are the practical advantages of questionnaires?

A
  • Quick and cheap
  • No need to recruit and hire staff
  • Easy to quantify to identify cause and effect relationships
32
Q

What are the theoretical advantages of questionnaires?

A
  • No person to influence participants answer including researcher
  • Exact same survey can be used over and over
  • Can test hypothesis of cause and effect relationships
  • Can ask a large sample so they are highly representative
33
Q

What are the ethical advantages of questionnaires?

A
  • Can be anonymous
  • Informed consent
  • Right to withdraw
34
Q

What are the practical issues of questionnaires?

A
  • May need to offer incentives
  • Do not know if the participant actually received the questionnaire
  • Do not know if the questionnaire was completed by the intended person
  • Need to be short meaning not alot of data can be gathered
  • Low response rate, S. Hite sent out 100,000 questionnaires by post and only recieved 4.5% back and those that respond may be different from those who don’t causing unrepresentative results and no generalisations can be made
35
Q

What are the theoretical issues of questionnaires?

A
  • Inflexible, no follow up questions can be asked
  • Fail to produce changing ideas over time, only take a snapshot of society
  • Interpretivists say that detached nature makes it low in validity
  • Respondants may lie, forget or not understand causing them to answer randomly or answer to please the researcher
  • Researcher’s meanings imposed through prewritten quesitons, multiple choice answers. Even when they are open ended, similar non-identical answers may be grouped together
36
Q

What is operationalisation and how is this made harder in schools?

A
  • Turning abstract concepts into a measurable form
  • Because children are young their grasp on abstract concepts are hard and they may misunderstand questions
37
Q

What are the pros and cons of sampling frames in education?

A

Pros
- Schools keep sample frames of teachers, pupils and parents such as pupil on FSM
- Distributing questionnaires is easy and fast if permission is given
- Children can take questionnaires home to their parents

Cons
- Relevant sampling frames may not exist and if they do schools may deny access
- Young children may discuss answers due to peer pressure
- Questionnaires are formal documents that can intimidate parents and pupils

38
Q

How are response rates like for questionnaires in education?

A
  • Schools may reject research that disrupts lessons or explicit sibjects such as underage sex
  • The head may authorise time out of lessons to complete the questionnaires
  • Teachers and pupils may be under pressure to complete surveys
  • Teachers used to completing survyes
  • Teachers may be too busy to complete surveys
39
Q

What are the practical issues of questionnaires in education?

A
  • Rutter used questionnaires to collect data from 12 London secondary schools giving correlation between class size and achievement but not the explanation for this correlation
  • Young children aren’t great at reading making it hard to answer questionnaires
  • Children have shorter attention span meaning questionnaires have to be short
  • Word of researcher may spread in school influencing answers from the pupils
  • Teacher’s may identify aim or hypothesis of questionnaire and tweak answers
40
Q

How does anonymity and detachment affect questionnaires in education?

A
  • Anonymity may overcome fear from young people giving more valid answers
  • Lack of rapport due to detachment may end up in less valid answers
  • Because questionnaires are formal documents anti-school subcultures may refuse to answer questionnaires
  • Teachers may be able to answer sensitive questions without worrying about their careers due to anonymity
41
Q

What are the different types of interviews?

A
  • Structured interviews, standardised and detached
  • Unstructured interviews, guided conversations where follow up questions can be asked
  • semi-structured interviews, questions are prepared but follow up questions can be asked
  • Group interviews, some interviews a dozen people are together
42
Q

What are the practical pros and cons of structured interviews?

A
  • Have to hire and train interviewers
  • Cannot match numbers as huge as questionnaires
  • Can be used for hypothesis testing
  • Straightforward for gathering factual information such as age, occupation etc
  • only 56 out of 987 people refused to be interviewed may be because people are afraid to sit down and talk but some people may be overwilling to be interviewed and therefore produce unrepresentative data
43
Q

What are the theoretical pros and cons interviews?

A
  • detached and standardised meaning it is highly reliable
  • invalid because if the multiple choice answers do not fit what the interviewee thinks than the data will be invalid and misunderstandings cannot be clarified
44
Q

What are the social factors in interviews?

A
  • Interviewer bias, asking leading questions can influence answers and interviewees can identify with interviewers too much stopping them from being detached
  • Artificiality of an interview can cause some people not to be truthful
  • Status and power inequalities, when adults interview children they try to please the interviewer more
  • Cultural differences, different meanings may be given to the same words
  • Social desirability, interviewee may answer to please the interviewer
45
Q

What are the different types of observations?

A
  • Non-participant, observes the group without taking part, usually overt
  • Participant, actually takes part in event, usually covert
  • Overt, participants know the true nature of the researcher
  • Covert, carried out under cover
  • Positivists used structured observation schedule noting when an action occurs producing quantitative data
46
Q

How does a researcher gain access to a group?

A

Making contact
- Gaining contact depends on personal characteristics
- James Patrick was young and knew one of the members of a criminal gang
- Fairhurst, hospitalised and conducted a study on what it was like to be a patient

Gaining access
- Making friends with a leading member in the group such as Sarah Thornton making friends with a girl named Kate to research the clubbing and ranch scene
- Characteristics of the researcher, some barriers can be overcome such as when Liebow gained access to a street gang. Griffin committed blackface to research racism and segregation and racism in the deep south
- The researchers role in the group should be non-disruptive and offer a good vantage point

47
Q

What is going native and some examples?

A
  • The researcher becomes over involved in the group such as punch who researched
  • An example of this is Maurice Punch who began forming arrests for his police colleagues
  • The researcher may spend so much time in the group that things stop being strange and they stop noting them down.
48
Q

What problems are there when getting out of observations?

A
  • Some people can abruptly leave but other cannot such as Ken Pryce being murdered by the Jamaican gang he as studying
  • Some people may find it difficult to enter the normal world again
  • Some people may not want to disclose research out of loyalty
49
Q

What are the advantages of overt observation?

A
  • Informed consent and right to withdraw
  • Allows researcher to ask naive questions such as why do you kill people
  • Observer can take notes openly
  • Allows researcher to use researcher methods to check insights derived from observations
50
Q

What are the two disadvantages of overt observations?

A
  • A group may refuse the researcher permission
  • Can create the Hawthorne effect.
51
Q

What are the practical pros and cons of covert observations?

A

Pros
- Reduces risk of Hawthorne effect producing valid data such as Laud Humprey’s stutdy into the homosexual culture of public tea rooms

Cons
- Requires the researcher to keep an act requiring detailed knowledge of the groups knowledge beforehand such as Patrick paying with cash instead of credit and fastened the middle button instead of the top one
- In order to gain acceptance to dangerous groups, imitation may require illegal activities
- Cannot take notes in the open such as Ditton who had to take notes in the toilet when researching threat in bread deliverymen

52
Q

What are the ethical issues of covert observations?

A
  • No informed consent or right to withdraw and research should only be posted if informed consent is gained after the researcher has gone overt
  • May have to lie to exit the group which can be deemed unethical
  • May have to participate in illegal activities
  • As witnesses they have an obligation to report any illegal activity
53
Q

What are the advantages of a participant observation?

A

Theoretical
- Validity, provides a picture of how people really live, the way people actually live and how they think they live is different
- Allows the researcher to gain verstehen which is preferred by interpretivists allowing the researcher to understand the values of the groups world
- Flexible, allows the researcher to enter research with an open mind

Practical
- Only way to gain access to dangerous groups and gain a rapport providing more valid data such as Aaron Cicourels study of police labelling criminals

54
Q

What are the disadvantages of participant observation?

A

Practical
- time
- Skills of the researcher
- Personally stressful
- Personal characteristics

Ethical
- Covert observations require lack of informed consent and right to withdraw

Theoretical
- Sample is very small and inside answers may not match outside meaning it is not representatives and cannot be generalised
- Each observation is of different people and is not standardised and cannot be followed in exactly the same way so it unreliable and rejected by positivists
- Risk of going native
- Loyalty to the group may lead to the person concealing information
- Attracts sociologists with an attachment to the underdog such as Willis romanticising the lads
- Rely on subjective opinions rather than actual facts

55
Q

What are the pros and cons of using structured observations in education?

A

Practical
- Use the Flanders system measures pupil teacher interactions quantitatively with the standard being every three seconds helping Flanders find that 68% of classroom time is a teacher talking, 20% by pupils and 12% confusion of silence
- This means that observations are quicker, cheaper and require less training

Theoretical
- FIAC Can provide qualitative data due to having 10 categories of classroom interaction meaning they can be repeated consistently
- Detached nature does not provide alid data such as norms and values

56
Q

What are the pros and cons of an unstructured observation in education?

A

Practical
- Eggleston needed over three months to set up cover
- Easier to observe pupils rather than interview them allowing Fuller to observe classrooms without parental consent
- Personal characteristics affect data such as Wright being African Caribbean affecting relationship with white teachers
- Limited by school timetable such as holidays
- Hammersley had to jot notes on the back of a newspaper quickly in order to stay covert affecting validity

Ethical
- Children are a vulnerable group and lack of informed consent and right to withdraw is not appropriate
- Researchers may witness anti-authority behaviour such as stealing and have an obligation to report it but this may break the trust of the student

Theoretical
- The Hawthorne effect, Ronald king had to allow children to become familiar with him being around in the background, he had to deny requests for help and used the Wendy house as a hide
- Education has a lot of social factors meaning the researcher may be rejected by some and accepted by others leading to a lack of representativeness
- Data is recorded unsystematically leading to a lack of reliability

57
Q

What are official statistics, how are they collected and what are some examples?

A
  • Official statistics are quantitiative data gathered by official bodies such as the government to use in policy making
  • They are gathered in two ways such as registration, it is legal to register children at birth anf official surveys such as the census
58
Q

What are the practical pros and cons of using secondary data?

A

Advantages
- Free source of large amount of data such as the census holding data of every household in the UK
- Statistics allow comparisons of groups such as employment between white and black people
- Show trends over time due to official data being collected over time

Disadvantages
- Statistics may not apply directly to the research such as Durkheim finding there were no statistics on religious suicide
- The government may use differently such as the definition of poverty may be different
- Definitions can change over time such as unemployment changing which means they cannot be compared

59
Q

What are the theoretical pros and cons of official statistics?

A

Advantages
- Extremely representative because they cover a large sample which means they can be used to make generalisations and test hypothesis
- Official statistics much larger than sociologist studies such as the crime survey for England and Wales in 2014 had a sample size of 50,000 people
- Reliable because they are standardised by trained staff.

Disadvantages
- Some sources more representatives such as birth rates are mandatory and cover whole populations
- Census coders may make mistakes or members of the public can make mistakes when filling it out
- Hard statistics have high validity such as birth rates but soft facts do not such as educational facts covering racist incidents such. The British crime survey found that in 2011 only 38% of crimes revealed were reported to the police and some were not recorded

60
Q

What are the different perspectives views on official statistics?

A

Positivism
- They are social facts and use them to test their hypothesis such as Durkheim comparing the suicide rates of Catholics had a lower suicide rate then Protestants due to more social integration

Interpretevism
- Official statistics lack validity and are socially constructed such as suicide rates only representing the amount of coroners labelling death suicides

Marxism
- Official statistics serve the needs of capitalism and are part of ruling class ideology such as the definition of unemployment changing in order to reduce the the amount officially unemployed

61
Q

What are the different types of documents used for sociological research?

A
  • Public documents, produced by public organisation such as schools including ofsted reports and league table positions and can also include public enquiries such as the black report which became a major source of information for sociologists
  • Personal documents, letters and diaries. Thomas and Znienecki, studied migration and social change finding out personal experiences through use of 764 letters bought from a newspaper ad and autobiographies.
  • Historical documents, Used for studying the past such as Michael Anderson studying parliamentary stats on child labour to study family structure changes in 19th century Preston
62
Q

What are the pros and cons of documents?

A
  • Authenticity, Hitler diaries fake showing it is easy to lie in documents
  • Credibility, politicians can lie to inflate their personality cult or influence and Thomas and Zneniecky’s immigrants could have inflated how good the USA was to justify their decision
  • Representativeness, Not all documents survive including the key ones, documents may become private over time due to the 30 year rule
  • Skills of the researcher may influence the derived meaning

Advantages
- Allow the researcher to develop verstehen
- Sometimes the only source of information
- Offer metholodigical pluralism to corss reference primary research findings
- Cheap source of data because someone else has already gathered the data

63
Q

What are the practical pros and cons of using official statistics to investigate education?

A

Advantages
- Government collects data on over 34000 schools
-

Sociology (9 decks)

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