Methods in context

• Power & status


  • Pupils/young people have less power than adults, which means they may find it hard to express their views openly, especially if they oppose adults
  • Schools are hierarchical institutions that give teachers more power and higher status than pupils
  • Teachers can use this to influence pupils chosen for research, such as making sure they portray the school in a good light
• Formal research methods


  • Structured interviews and questionnaires reinforce power differences because the researcher decides what questions are asked and how answers should be given
  • Generally not the best way to research young people
• Group Interviews


  • May be a good way to overcome the power/status differences between researchers and young participants, but some differences will remain no matter what method is used
• Pupil attitudes


  • Pupils' resentment of power/status differences with teachers can affect how they relate to the researcher, such as refusing to participate
• Ability & understanding


  • Pupils' lack of self-expression, thinking skills and confidence can be more limited than adults, especially when expressing abstract ideas
  • This is a problem for researchers because abstract concepts are central to sociology
  • Researchers will have to word questions in a way that young people can clearly understand
  • Limited political understanding also makes it difficult to get their informed consent, because the researcher might not be able to explain the research in a way for pupils to understand
  • Young people's language may mean that they need more time to understand questions, and their less-developed memory can mean that they might not be able to recall relevant material in detail when asked
  • However, pupils aren't a homogenous group, and factors like age, class, gender and ethnicity all affect their ability and understanding differently
• Vulnerability & ethical issues

  • Informed consent is needed from the pupils as well as their parents and teachers, but this may be hard to explain to a child and they might not be mature enough to decide
  • Child protection issues are important - personal data shouldn't be kept unless it's vital to the research, and the form the research takes should be considered so that the pupils aren't understressed
  • Gatekeepers like parents, heads, teachers, and governors will control access to pupils, and the more gatekeepers, the harder it is to carry out or sustain research
• Laws & guidelines


  • The Safeguarding and Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 requires adults working in schools to have DBS checks, which can delay or prevent a researcher starting their research
  • Due to safeguarding concerns, organisations like UNICEF and the National Children's Bureau have made special codes of practice for researching young people
  • One advantage of researching pupils is that sociologists know where to find them as children are legally required to be in school, but this may not be the case if the target group are out-of-school pupils who truant regularly
• Researching teachers


  • Teachers feel overworked, so may not be fully cooperative with a researcher, even if they want to be helpful
  • Power relations in school aren't equal: teachers have more power/status because of their age, experience and responsibility in school, and they also have a duty of care and legal responsibility for the pupils they teach
  • The nature of classrooms reinforces the power of the teacher because they see it as 'my classroom', where a researcher is a trespasser
  • However, teachers aren't fully independent - what they can do is constrained by heads, governors, parents and pupils, even in their classroom
  • Researchers doing covert research need to develop a 'cover' such as a supply teacher in order to carry out their investigations, but this gives them a lower status and teachers may not treat them as equals
• Impression management


  • Teachers are used to being observed and scrutinised during Ofsted inspections, which means they can be more willing to be observed by a researcher
  • However, Goffman (1969) argues that teachers are highly skilled at impression management (manipulating the impression others have of them) due to needing to 'put on an act' for pupils and others
  • Researchers therefore need to be able to 'get behind' the public face teachers put on, and some study teachers in the staffroom because it's their 'back stage' setting
  • However, the staffroom is a small social space and the researcher may not have access to it, and as a newcomer would stand out to all the teachers who know each other
  • Teachers will be aware of any critical comments they make about the school and how it'd affect their career prospects, which is why they may not answer questions honestly. However, the researcher may overcome this by using observational methods
  • Head teachers may also affect representativeness by choosing teachers they know will speak well of the school- this is also impression management
• Classrooms


  • Classrooms are unusual because they're a closed social setting that has clear physical and social boundaries
  • They're a highly controlled setting as the teacher and school control the classroom's layout and access, as well as pupil time, activities, noise level, dress and language use while in the room
  • Young people rarely have this level of surveillance in other areas of their lives
  • This means that classroom behaviour observed by the researcher might not be an accurate reflection of what those involved think/feel
  • Teachers and pupils are very experienced in hiding their real thoughts and feelings from each other when interacting in class
• Gatekeepers


  • Unlike other social environments, access to classrooms is controlled by a range of gatekeepers including headteachers, teachers and child protection laws
  • The more gatekeepers there are, the harder it is for a researcher to obtain and maintain access
• Peer groups


  • Young people may be insecure about their identity/status, therefore making them more sensitive to peer-pressure when in classes/friend groups at school
  • This can affect the way they respond to being researched
  • To solve this, it may be necessary to supervise pupils filling out questionnaires to make sure they aren't influenced by peers in class
  • In the same way, the true attitudes of individual pupils may be hidden when they're interviewed as a group of peers
• Researching schools


  • The sheer number of schools means a sociologist using observation methods won't have time to investigate them all, risking their research being unrepresentative
  • Using large-scale surveys or official stats can overcome this, though you lose the detail observation methods obtain
  • Identifying the research population is easy because the state publishes lists of schools, where they're located and what type they are
• Schools' own data


  • The inner workings of schools are highly scrutinised by the media, parents and politicians, and the highly marketised system puts parental choice and competition between schools at its heart
  • This means that there's a lot of secondary data about schools publicly available, often made by schools themselves
  • Data like exam results/league tables, truancy & subject choice figures, Ofsted reports, government inquiries and school policy documents
  • Schools themselves make personal documents like individual pupil reports
  • Schools are therefore data-rich, and sociologists can make use of the secondary data. However they may not be able to get access to school records as they are confidential
  • Other school data may have issues, like truancy figures being falsified to make the school look better, and the legal duty to record all racist incidents being sidestepped by downplaying what has happened to maintain a positive image
  • In the same way, official stats about exams should be treated with care as schools can change their curriculum to get better results, like entering pupils for lower entry exams
• The law


  • The law requires young people to attend school so they can be educated
  • The advantage of the captive population is that the researcher will know where everyone should be at any moment
  • The disadvantage is that because school's role is to educate pupils, headteachers may see researchers as interfering with this function
  • The legal framework requiring schools to record pupils' attendance, achievement, etc can be useful to sociologists, though the legal duty of care schools have to pupils means they will deny researchers access to this information
• Gatekeepers


  • Headteachers and governors have the power to refuse a researcher access to the school if they think it will undermine teachers' activity or interfere with the work of the school
  • Meighan and Harber (2007) found that heads sometimes view researchers negatively and had the following views: 1) It's unfair to involve pupils in commenting on their teachers, 2) Discipline would be adversely affected, 3) It would be bad for classroom relationships, 4) Pupils are not competent enough to judge teachers
  • Heads may also steer researchers away from situations, like a class where the teacher has poor skills
• School organisation


  • Schools have formal structures, timetables, meetings, and bureaucracies that can constrain a sociologist's research activities
  • The gendered and hierarchical nature of schools, where teachers, and heads see them as specialists in wheels that have student-teacher conflict, the research can even be seen as the opposite gender and distracts unwelcome attention
• Researching parents


  • Parents also have a part in the educational process and can influence what goes on in education: 1) By how they bring up their children, 2) By their involvement in school- teacher contacts, parent governors, attending parents' evenings, etc, 3) Marketisation policies encourage parents to see themselves as consumers, affecting school choice
  • However, they aren't an easy group to study as they're not homogeneous, and their class, gender and ethnicity can affect how willing/able they are to participate in research
  • EG pro-school middle-class parents may be more likely to return questionnaires than working-class parents, making the research's findings unrepresentative
  • Parental permission is also needed for many forms of research with pupils, and their likelihood of giving consent can be based on the sensitivity of the research issue and if they think it will benefit their child
  • Parents can also engage in impression management, like exaggerating about their involvement in their child's education, so they look good. This can cause invalid data as the true figures are unknown
• Access to parents


  • While sociologists see parents as playing a vital role in children's education, most parent-child interaction takes place at home, so there's not much opportunity to observe a parent helping their child with work
  • Parents are also an unusual group within education as they're the only one outside of school, making them difficult to contact and research as lists of the school's parent/pupil addresses aren't normally released to researchers
• The researcher's own educational experiences

  • Researchers may draw on their own experience of education when formulating their hypotheses or interpreting data
  • However, their personal experience/familiarity with classrooms can dull their awareness of how different school environments are to other social settings
  • Sociologists who have spent years in school and university may find these places 'natural', and therefore need to be aware of their taken for granted assumptions about schools, classrooms, teachers and pupils
  • It's also likely that the researcher did well in school, which makes it harder for them to empathise with pupils in an underachieving anti-school subculture
  • Class, gender and ethnicity differences between researcher and pupils can also hinder research