Last Updated on October 18, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Pupils are at the centre of the education system, so educational researchers can reasonably expect to have to research them at some point in their careers.
This post outlines some of the challenges researchers face when researching pupils in the context of education. It has been written primarily for students of A-level sociology answering the Methods in Context question on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1), where pupils are one of the research contexts the mark scheme rewards you for applying.
Researching in education Pupils · Teachers · Parents · Classrooms · Issues in schools How to use these in the exam: How to Answer Methods in Context Questions
Why might you want to research pupils?
The whole education system is based around pupils. Without them there are no teachers, no Ofsted, no exams, no system! So it makes sense to ask them their opinions on education from time to time.
Pupils tend to have lower status than staff in the system, so giving them a voice is ethically sound.
Schools want to portray themselves in a good light, so the official picture they give of their institutions may not be accurate. Pupils can offer a different view of what school life is really like.
Failing students often don’t get a voice, and they probably don’t want to talk about education, so finding out what they think might be especially valuable.
The problems of researching pupils
Access and sampling
If conducting research within schools, senior leaders and teachers may select which students researchers get to collect data from, possibly choosing the better-behaved students to portray the school in a positive light.
Because pupils are classed as vulnerable, there are going to be gatekeepers to get through before any research with them can take place: probably both parents and teachers.
Validity
Once a researcher has gained access, pupils may be reluctant to open up because they are not used to talking to adults other than their parents and teachers.
Younger pupils will be less able to grasp the meaning of key concepts such as social class, or even ‘occupation’, so researchers will have to think carefully about how they operationalise concepts so that students can understand them.
The reading ability of younger learners may mean that questionnaires will not be a suitable method of investigating their attitudes, so interviews or observations will probably be more appropriate, and these tend to be more time-consuming.
Speech codes may be a barrier to a researcher gaining the trust and understanding of certain groups of students.
The attitudes pupils have towards the power structure of the school may also influence the validity of the data a researcher gets. A pro-school student may be reluctant to criticise the school, whereas anti-school students may criticise it even when their criticisms are not valid.
Ethical issues
Younger pupils may not be able to fully understand the purpose of the research, so it may not be possible to gain fully informed consent from them.
Given the general status of children as ‘vulnerable’, researchers need to take special care that students do not suffer any unnecessary harm (such as stress) during the research process.
Researchers will have to work within child protection rules: they will need a criminal record check (a DBS check) in advance, and must make sure that no personal data they collect is shared.
Spending time with pupils
It is highly unlikely that researchers today would be allowed the kind of unsupervised access to pupils that Paul Willis had in the 1970s, when he spent 18 months observing his ‘lads’ in school for Learning to Labour.
That makes long-term participant observation with pupils much harder to arrange than it once was. HOWEVER, it isn’t impossible: Mac an Ghaill’s Young, Gifted and Black (1988) is an example, covered in Participant Observation to Research Education, and the exam can still ask you to evaluate it, as in participant observation and pupil exclusions.
How this comes up in the exam
In a Methods in Context answer, the item will often tell you that the research involves pupils, and sometimes a particular group of pupils. You get application marks for linking the method to the points above: gatekeepers, vulnerability and consent, pupils’ understanding, and pro- and anti-school attitudes.
Past-paper questions on researching pupils include:
- group interviews to investigate subject choices made by pupils
- non-participant observation to investigate pupil behaviour in schools
- covert participant observation to investigate pupils with behavioural difficulties
- self-completion questionnaires to investigate unauthorised absences from school
Signposting
This post has been written primarily for students studying research methods in context, as part of the AQA’s A-level Sociology course.
It is one of five posts on research contexts in education: Researching Teachers, Researching Parents, Researching in Classrooms and Issues Surrounding Researching in Schools cover the others.
Please click here to return to the Research Methods page, or here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com.
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