Secondary sources with context links to education

Question 1

secondary sources make use of resources and findings that already exist. these include:

Answer 1

• documents and official stats

Question 2

Documents

Answer 2

two forms:

• personal documents e.g diaries, photos and are high in validity as they’re usually detailed
• public documents e.g official reports like info from governments and are often easy to to obtain due to legal requirements
• interpretivists favour the use of documents as they are rich in qualitative data and can be used to discover meanings behind actions for individuals

Question 3

Historical documents

Answer 3

• are useful when researching past event

- documents are often evaluated using ‘content analysis, this allows qualitative documents to be quantified

Question 4

EVALUATION (DOCUMENTS)

Answer 4

• public documents are often subjective as the creators
  are always aware that it will be in the public domain
• personal documents are hard to analyse as they don’t follow a standardised structure as they are unique to individuals and events they lack reliabilty
• personal document can be highly subjective as they only represent the views of the individual who created them
• historical documents may be difficult to analyse as they contain language that has changed over years
• content analysis can be difficult as it is highly subjective

Question 5

official statistics

Answer 5

• positivists like the use of official statistics as they are naturally quantitative data which meets their main goal,of being reliable and representative
• they can be ‘hard statistics’ which cannot easily be disputed, such as birth or death rate
• they can be ‘soft statistics’ i.e crime statistics
• they’re produced by government agencies
• large samples of official stats are highly representative
• sociologists may use ‘triangulation’ in order to time to look deeper into the causes of patterns

Question 6

EVALUATION (OFFICIAL STATS)

Answer 6

• interpretivists suggest that official stats are ‘social constructs’
• crime stats only reflect the views of the groups that create them, such as the police and law courts
• the crimes that naturally miss being displayed are known as the ‘dark figure of crime’
• marxists suggest that stats reflect the findings they want to display because they’re from the government
• stats can be easily manipulated by those in power to hide areas of concern

Question 7

Secondary sources

Answer 7

• official stats are readily avaliable within the education system
• statistics closely analyse pupil performance, genders and social class
• patterns are already monitored closely by government agencies and published in league tables and ofstead reports
• as a result of marketisation, school performance is easy to examine with schools forced to be transparent about pupil achievement
• schools share documents such as the national curriculum which has a direct impact on a wide range of schools