Using secondary sources to investigate education

Using official statistics to investigate education

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.

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Practical issues

Much of the data is published and thus available to the sociologist saving them time and money. Educational statistics allow sociologists to make comparisons between the achievements of different social groups on ethnicity, gender and social class.

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Practical issues (2)

Also because educational statistics are collected at regular and frequent intervals, sociologists can make comparisons over time. For example annually gathered exam statistics enable the sociologist to see trends in results.

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Practical issues (3)

Governments gather statistics to monitor the effectiveness of their educational policies such as those dealing with the curriculum, subject choice, raising standards and reducing inequality of achievement. Such issues are also of great relevant to

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Practical issues (4)

sociologists so the statistics produced by government may be very useful to researchers. However governments collect statistics for their own policy purposes and these may not be the same as those of sociologists.

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Practical issues (5)

For example sociologists are very interested in the relationship between language, social class and achievement, but there are no official statistics available for this. Even where the state collects educational statistics of sociological interests

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Practical issues (6)

the definitions of key concepts may differ from those that sociologists use. For example official definitions of pupils' social class are based on parental occupation whereas Marxist sociologists define class in terms of property ownership.

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Practical issues (7)

The state may not collect statistics on pupils' social class as such but only on pupils who are entitled to free school meals. Because of the stigma and peer group bullying sometimes associated with receiving free school meals some pupils don't claim

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Practical issues (8)

them even when entitled to do so. Furthermore because official statistics are secondary data, they cannot tell the sociologist about the interaction processes in school that may lead to this under-claiming.

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Practical issues (9)

Although free school meals are used as an indicator of low class position not all those entitled to them are working class. Nor are all working class children entitled to free school meals- only those from relatively poor backgrounds will qualify.

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Representativeness

Some official statistics on education are highly representative. For example all state schools have to complete a school census three times a year. This collects information on pupils' attendance, ethnicity and gender.

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Reliability

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

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Reliability (2)

statistics on education, they are generally very reliable. This is because the government imposes standard definitions and categories for their collection, which all schools must use. This enables the process to be replicated from year to year

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Reliability (3)

allowing direct comparisons to be made for example of school performance over time. However governments may change the definitions and categories.

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Validity

Interpretivists question the validity of educational statistics. They argue that such statistics are socially constructed. For example they see truancy statistics as the outcome of a series of definitions and decisions made by social actors.

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Validity (2)

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 themselves in the

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Validity (3)

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.

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Using documents to investigate education

Schools, colleges, local authorities and the Department for 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 documents.

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Using documents to investigate education (2)

Documents cover many educational issues that sociologists are interested in including ethnic, class and gender differences, the curriculum, gender stereotyping in school books, racist incidents in schools and special educational needs.

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Practical issues

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.

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Practical issues (2)

David Gillborn (1995) in his study of racism and schooling was able to access a wide range of school documents . These documents gave Gillborn the 'official' picture of what was happening in terms of racism and anti-racism in the schools he studied.

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Practical issues (3)

Gillborn then compared this with the data he collected from interviews and observation. Similarly Gewirtz et al (1995) in their study of marketisation and education, found that school brochures and prospectuses were a useful free source of data.

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Practical issues (4)

Personal documents can be more difficult to access. Valerie Hey (1997) 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 as the girls were experts at

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Practical issues (5)

hiding them from teachers. Some educational documents are confidential such as teachers' personnel files and pupils' disciplinary records so sociologists may be unable to gain access to them.

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Ethical issues

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

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Ethical issues (2)

personal documents. For example Hey collected in the notes that girls had passed to each other in class. In some cases the girls offered her the notes freely but in others Hey collected them from desks at the end of the lesson and in one case a

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Ethical issues (3)

teacher took them from the wastepaper bin and offered them to her. Thus in some cases informed consent for their use had not been obtained.

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Representativeness

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.

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Reliability

Many public documents are produced in a systematic format. This enables researchers to make direct comparisons of the absence rates of pupils in different schools. However deliberate falsifications or accidental mistakes made when filling in

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Reliability (2)

registers reduce 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. Lobban examined 179 stories from 6 school reading

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Reliability (3)

schemes looking for gender stereotyping. She analysed the content of each story using the same set of categories counting the number of times images fell into each category. Future researchers can easily apply systematic content analysis of this kind

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Reliability (4)

to create comparative data from educational documents.

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Validity

Documents can provide important insights into the meanings held by teachers and pupils and can therefore be high in validity. For example Hey initially examined girls' friendships in schools through observation and interview. Eventually she realised

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Validity (2)

that she was ignoring a useful source of insight into girls' feelings and actions- the notes were passed to each other in class. Although teachers considered these notes to be bits of silliness Hey found that they offered valuable insights into the

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Validity (3)

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. For example we cannot be sure that Hey's interpretation of the meaning

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Validity (4)

of the notes was the same as that of the girls. Also because the girls sometimes handed Hey the notes after the class it is possible that they were written with her in mind and may have not been spontaneous.

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Using secondary sources to investigate education

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