Last Updated on October 18, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Teachers are the ‘front line’ of education, with the main day-to-day responsibility for students’ education and wellbeing.
If you want to understand the impact education policies are having on different types of student, teachers are probably best placed to tell you. HOWEVER, there are a number of potential problems when researching teachers.
This post has been written for the Methods in Context question on AQA Paper 1 (7192/1), where teachers 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
Teachers have hectic working lives
Teachers work very long hours and many suffer from high levels of stress, so they may not be willing or able to give up more time for researchers.
The government’s own survey of teachers shows how big the problem is. In the Department for Education’s Working lives of teachers and leaders survey (2025), full-time teachers in England reported working an average of 50.1 hours in a term-time week. 86% agreed that they experience stress in their work, and only 26% agreed that their workload was acceptable.
For this reason, questionnaires may be a better choice of method than interviews. Observation might also seem a good choice, as it doesn’t really take up teachers’ time. HOWEVER, being observed could add to teacher stress, so it might be difficult to get teachers to agree to it.
That DfE survey is itself a good example of researching teachers by questionnaire: over 10,000 teachers and leaders took part, a sample size that would be impossible with interviews.
Teacher professionalism
The validity of the information you get from teachers may be compromised because of their professional status.
Teachers must follow data protection law (GDPR) and have a duty of care towards their students, so they probably will not share data about their students with researchers from outside the school.
Teachers could also be concerned with impression management. They may want to present themselves in the best possible light, and some may feel duty-bound to present their school in a good light, because that is good for marketing and student recruitment. This could limit the critical views you get from teachers as a researcher.
On the other hand, there are also ‘jaded’ teachers who are fed up with their jobs and are just time-serving their way to retirement. If you got a group of these together in a group interview, you might just get unrepresentative, biased moaning about how bad life is as a teacher.
Line managers
If you want to gain access to teachers in a school, you will have to approach the senior leadership team. They may limit which teachers you can research, possibly directing you towards the better and more compliant teachers, to paint their school and its management in a positive light.
Even if you had unlimited access to teachers, they may not wish to be critical of the school for fear of it getting back to their managers. In some schools there may be very few critical teachers. If the findings showed negative views of the school, it would probably be obvious which teachers were responsible for the negative comments, even if the data was anonymous.
Is home the best place to research teachers?
Don’t forget that you don’t have to research teachers in their school. You may get more valid information if you interview them at home, away from the school setting: away from the ‘front stage’ where they are performing their teacher role.
How this comes up in the exam
In a Methods in Context answer, the item will often tell you that the research involves teachers. You get application marks for linking the method to the points above: time pressure and stress, impression management, gatekeeping by senior leaders, and the risk that anonymity breaks down in a small staff room.
For a classic example of researching teachers, Becker’s interviews with Chicago teachers are covered in Using Interviews to Research Education.
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 Pupils, Researching Parents, Researching in Classrooms and Issues Surrounding Researching in Schools cover the others.
Using Surveys to Research Education looks at questionnaires with teachers, pupils and parents.
Please click here to return to the Research Methods page, or here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com.