Saturday 14 April 2012

Explaining girl's improvement

Changes in attitude -
Girls and young women's attitudes towards education, work and marriage seem to have changed. Sue Sharpe compared the attitudes of working-class girls in London schools in the early 70s and 90s and she found that the girls in 1990 were more confident, more assertive, more ambitious and more committed to gender equality.
The main priorities of the 1970s girls were 'love, marriage, husbands and children. By the 1990s, this had changed to 'job, career and being able to support themselves'. And education was seen as the main route to a good job and financial independence.

Changes in the labour market and attitude to work
There has been a steady rise in the number of women in the labour market and this has been accompanied by a rise in women's occupational ambitions - increasing numbers are looking forward to careers rather than simply jobs. This has led to a higher value being placed on education as a means to a good job. Studies of primary and secondary pupils indicate girls are increasingly aiming for occupations which require degree level qualifications (Francis and Skeleton, 2005).
According to Sue Sharp girls are increasingly wary of marriage due to witnessing adult relationships breaking up all around them.

Changes in marriage and marital breakup
Over the past 30 years, there have been fewer marriages, divorces and more lone-parent families, most of which are headed by women (Social Trends, 2007)

Changes in schools
There has been a growing awareness of gender bias in schools and attempts to remove it. For example girls were put off by what were traditionally boy subjects such as maths and technology, this led to the introduction of equal opportunity initiatives such as Girls into science and technology.

Changes in society - risk and individualism
A number of sociologists claim that today's society is characterised by risk, uncertainty and individualisation. For example, with rising divorce rate, the future marriage is increasingly uncertain. And the same applies to the future work. ' jobs for life' have largely disappeared and a person's working life is becoming more unpredictable. At the same time people are increasingly seeing themselves as individuals rather than members of social groups, they look at themselves as being more self-sufficient and self-reliant.

Gender and educational acheivement

Results obtained from a table of the percentage of pupils attaining five or more GCSE grades A*-C in England shows that girls have continuously achieved more than boys since 1990-2007. Although the gender difference has rose and then decreased again there is still a large gap between the two genders approximately 10% every year.

A graph on students in higher education shows that the number of males in higher education is significantly larger than females. This goes against the previous statement as more males are trying to degrees.

Boys are doing better than boys Over the past 50 years, the educational performance of boys and young men has steadily improved. Overall, the performances of girls has risen at a faster rate. However, this doesn't justify that all boys are underachievers. Many boys are achieving extremely well (Coffey, 2001).

Only some boys are failing Only certain groups of boys are underachieving. There is a close link between male underachievement and social class - compared to other groups, a high proportion of working-class boys are failing (Epstein et al, 1998).

Whats new? In some respect, there's nothing new about girls outperforming boys. When the 11-plus exam was introduced in the 1940s, more girls passed than boys. The results were fiddled so that roughly equal numbers of boys and girls went to grammar schools. If results hadn't been adjusted, then two thirds of grammar school places would have gone to girls (Chitty, 2002).

Girls failure The preoccupation with 'failing boys' diverts attention from underachieving girls. A high proportion of working-class girls are failing in the school system (Plummer, 2000).


What has changed? In general, the educational performance of girls has improved significantly since the 80s and their improvement has been greater than that of boys. But this does not men boys a group are failing. The educational performance of most boys in improving.

Gender, class and ethnicity The gender gap is significant but it is important to note that class has over five times the effect on educational attainment than gender, and ethnicity twice the effect (Gilbron and Mirza, 2000).

Explanations - Why pupils with working class backgrounds are less successful

Material deprivation - A lack of money and the things money can buy
A lack of encouragement, stimulation and interest from parents
Working-class subculture with it's emphasis on fatalism, present-time orientation and immediate gratification
Cultural deprivation- An absence in the norms, values and skills needed for high attainment. This view has been strongly criticised
The use of elaborated code in schools which disadvantages many working-class pupils
A lack of cultural capital
A lack of social capital
Middle-class pupils are more likely to be placed in higher streams, working-class pupils in lower streams. Entering more working-class pupils for lower level exams, denying them the opportunity to obtain the top grades

Social class and educational attainment

Some researchers argue that class difference in attainment result in the sifting, sorting and assessment of pupils in terms of teachers' perceptions of social class, ability and conduct. Others argue hat class differences in attainment are primarily due to what happens outside the school - to the social inequalities generated by the class structure. Other researchers see class differences in attainment resulting from a combination of what happens inside and outside the school. From this viewpoint the inequalities of the class system are reinforced in the class room.

Education - Participant Observation

David Hargreaves (1967) examined the effects of streaming on the behaviour of students and teachers in a boy's secondary school. He used participant observation as his main method. He sat at the back of the classroom observing.

Some of the teachers changed their behaviour when observed. The teacher made the students work quietly from textbooks whereas usually he set written work. The teacher sent the boys to the back of the class room to show their books. The teacher 'appeared to behave quite naturally and act as if I wasn't there' most of the time although the boys noted some changes in their teacher's behaviour.

The strength of this method is that the researcher got to obtain the information needed first hand, so he knows it will be accurate. A weakness is that because both the teachers and students know the researcher is in the room, it is likely they will change their behaviour and therefore the information obtained may not be very valid.

Friday 6 April 2012

The internet

More recently the internet has made a vast range of data and research available to sociologists that was very hard to access before. The internet allows researchers to to analyse and re-analysedata in a depth of detail.

Although the internet is full of lots of useful information it is also full of a lot of bias and error. It can also be quite difficult to find exactly what you are looking for due to so many different websites. Anyone can post information on the internet which means there is no control over the quality of the content, unlike books and journals.

Content Analysis

Most documentary data is qualitative, but it is possible to convert this into quantitative data using content analysis. Using this technique, the researcher classifies the content of the document into categories and then counts how much of the content falls into each category. This makes it possible to make quantitative comparisons between documents.

Mass Media


Films, television programmes, TV news, newspapers and even novels are rich sources of evidence for the sociologist. Although they must be aware that these accounts of events have been created by an author or journalist rather than being factual objective descriptions of events.

Documents

There are two kinds of documents that sociologists can use, personal and public.

Personal documents: These include letters and diaries and are likely to be used by sociologists who take a qualitative approach and want to understand more about the experience and views of people in the past. Published biographies and autobiographies may also be considered to be in this category but they are intended for publication so may be less truthful.

Public documents: These include school records, parish records, social work records, court records, hospital records and reports of government enquiries.

Official Statistics

Official statistics are a source of secondary data and are easily available to sociologists as they already exist. These statistics could be present, the recent past or distant past.
Official statistics are the statistics produced and published by the government and its agencies and are collected through government surveys, registration and record-keeping.

Advantages:
They are readily available
They cover a wide range of subjects in detail
They cover large populations, so are usually representative
They are genereally reliable
They enable comparisons to be made over time

Disadvantages:
The data may not be valid
The data may be incomplete
The data may have been altered for political purposes

Advantages/Disadvantages - Participant observation


Advantages:
Participants behave as they normally do, so evidence is valid
It takes the viewpoint of the participants rather than the researcher
It can dig deep into social interaction
The researcher is open to new insights (the questions are not fixed in advance)

Disadvantages:
It studies small groups so may not be representative
It cannot be checked or repeated for reliability
It is time-consuming in relation to the amount of data collected
The researcher's presence may change the behaviour of the grouo
The researcher may be biased
If the research is covert there are more potential disadvantages:
It can raise serious ethical issues as there is no consent
The researcher may be at risk
The researcher may not be able to ask the questions they would like to ask, as they may risk uncovering who they actually are

Levels of participation

A complete participant - The researcher conceals the fact that they are doing research and this is known as Covert Observation. An example of this could be somebody joining a circle of friends in a school without them knowing they are observing them, this could be to investigate something like an anti-school sub-culture.
A participant observer - The researcher is actively involved with the group but is known to be researching, this is known as Overt Observation. An example is a researcher sitting in a class room observing students in their lessons and writing notes down and maybe even interviewing them afterwards.
A non-participant observer - The researcher is detached and an unobtrustive onlooker. This can either be covert or overt. This type of observation is necessarry when the researcher is very different from those being researched because of their age or sex for example.

Participant Observation

This research method allows you to take part in the life of the group that you wish to research whilst at the same time observing and taking notes about what is going on. This method collects mainly qualititative data.

In a participant observation study, the researcher joins the group or social situation that is being studied. The aim of this method is to understand what is happening from the point of view of those involved. The research is naturalistic so is therefore not based on an artificial situation that some methods such as questionnaires create. This type of research can take any length of time, from days to years.

Advantages/Disadvantages - Questionnaires


Questionnaires - by post, telephone or email
Advantages - Reduces the personal influence of the researcher, Produces quantitative, reliable and representative data.
Disadvantages - Response rate may be low, Answers may be incomplete, Data may not be valid, Cannot be sure who completed the questionnaire, Limits possible answers the participant can give.

Structured interviews - face to face or by telephone
Advantages - Higher response rate, Can 'probe' the participant's responses by asking follow-up questions, Can assess truthfulness of participant
Disadvantages - 'Interview effect', Time-consuming so may get fewer responses, Limits possible answers the participant can give

Unstructured interviews - face to face or by telephone
Advantages - Can create rapport with participant, Can follow up responses in depth, Produces valid qualitative data
Disadvantages - Personal bias of interviewer, Data may be less reliable, Time-consuming

Thursday 5 April 2012

Structured/Unstructured

Interviews can be structured or unstructured. A structured interview is where the researcher reads out a list of questions and writes down or records the respondent's answers. An unstructured interview is more like a guided conversation, where the talk is informal but the researcher asks questions to ensure that the participant keeps to the subject of the research.

Piloting
A pilot stidy should always be carried out. This acts like a mini test run of the real method. It provides the opportunity to test questionnaires and interview schedules on a small group of people from the research population, in order to check that the questions asked are clear and do not upset or lead the participants and to ensure the method will produce the kind of data that is wanted. The draft questionnaire can be revised if needed to ensure that no problems occur in the real thing.

Types of questions

In order to ask somebody to participate in your survey you need to create your questionnaire which is simply lists of questions written down in advance and asked in a fixed order, they can be administered face to face, by telephone or by post and email.

Questions may be:
Closed - The range of possible answers is fixed for example, Have you achieved 5 A*-C grades in your GCSE's? Yes/No
Open-ended - The respondent can answer however they like for example, What encouraged you to achieve in school?
Multiple Choice - There are a number of options the respondent can choose from when answering, for example, Why did you not achieve as well as you should have?
Didn't have the resources at home
Didn't have support from teachers
Didn't revise as much as you should have
Other .....

Closed and multiple choice questions can produce quantitative data but limits the answers the respondent can give whereas open-ended questions enable the respondent to express themselves but produces data that is difficult to express quantitatively.

Survey's

Survey's are widely used by sociologists because they are able to obtain large amounts of data in the form of statistics from a large number of people over a wide area in a relatively short space of time. A survey is sometimes used on its own as the complete research design but also can be used alongside other methods.

The steps required to carry out a survery are as follows:
Formulate the research question of hypothesis
Identify the population
Draft the questionnaire
Pilot the questionnaire
Finalise the questionnaire
Select the sample
Collect the data
Analyse the data
Write the report

When you have the questions prepared you need to know what part of the population you want to target to find out the answers you need. Survey's are usually carried out in samples which basically means a small proportion of the population. Researchers have to select a sample which they feel will be representative of the population.
There are various types of samples, the first being random sampling. This sampling means every member of the population has an equal chance of being included. The ways in which you can create a random sample can be by choosing names out of a hat, or using a computer to generate random names or numbers and also quasi-random can be used.
Stratified random sampling is another method which is used when the researcher has a sampling frame that shows the main characteristics of the population so you are certain that your sample will contain the right proportions of each category.
Quota sampling is where rather than identifying individuals in a sample and then contacting them, the researcher establishes how many participants are needed in each category and goes looking for them and asks if they are willing to participate in the survey.
Snowball sampling is where the researcher interviews an individual and then asks them to suggest who else might be interviewed.
Convenience sampling is a sample that is easy for the researcher to contact.

Primary/Secondary

Primary Data
Primary data is data that the researcher has collected themselves.
The two most common methods of collecting primary data is through surverys or by observation.

Secondary Data
Secondary data is data that is already available to sociologists.
The most common methods are official statistics, reports, historical documents, personal letters, diaries and research done by private organisations.

Quantitative/Qualitative

Quantitative data is data in the from of numbers for example statistics. These statistics are useful to put straight into graphs and charts to show your sociological results.

Qualitative data is data in the from of writing, this type is more detailed than quantitative so may provide you with more useful information.
There are many factors that can affect educational attainment, these being class, gender and ethnicity. In order to find out what these factors are and so you are able to investigate further, a sociologist will need to use appropriate methods to collect this information.