Tag: research methods
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Secondary Data on Academic Progress
What are the strengths and limitations of using secondary data to research the academic progress of students in schools? This challenging question came up in the methods in Context section of the November 2021 AQA A-Level Sociology exam, and students found it difficult according the Examiners Report, with significant numbers focussing only on quantitative secondary…
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Bias in Presenting Quantitative Data
Newspapers can ‘bias’ the presentation of quantitative data by stretching out the scale of the data they present, making differences between bars seem larger than they actually are (or vice versa!).
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The Mass Shooter Database…
Mass shootings per year in America are increasing, and some recent research from the Violence Project aims to help us understand why this is. For students of A-level Sociology this is a useful case study relevant to both research methods and crime and deviance. The project has interviewed hundreds of people convicted of mass shootings…
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Teaching Resources for A-level Sociology: Research Methods
teaching resources for A-level sociology AQA focus 2020
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Issues surrounding researching in schools
There are tens of thousands of schools in the United Kingdom, which means that observational research which focuses on just one, or a handful of schools will be unrepresentative. This is also a problem with any of the popular documentary programmes which focus on just one school – they are very interesting as they focus…
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Researching Parents
Home factors have more of an influence on pupil performance than school factors, and parents are certainly the biggest influencers of pupils at home, especially in their early years. Parents can influence a child’s attitude towards education in various ways: The amount of time they spend reading with their children in early years How they…
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Researching Teachers in Education
Teachers are the ‘front line’ of education, with the primary day to day responsibility students’ education and well-being. If you want to understand the impacts that education policies are having on different types of student, then teachers are probably best placed to be able to tell you. However, there are a number of potential problems…
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Starters for An A-level Sociology Non-Participant Observation Lesson
Non-Participant Observation involves the researcher observing respondents, but keeping their distance, and not engaging with those respondents. As with many of the ‘minor’ research methods in A-level sociology, this one can be a bit of a struggle to make interesting, but here are three starter activities to get your students in the mood for making…
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Experiments within schools
What are the strengths and limitations of using laboratory and field experiments to research education?
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Autobiographies in social research
An autobiography is an account of the life of an individual, written by that individual, sometimes with the assistance of a professional biographer. One of the most popular UK autobiographies of 2020 was Harry and Meghan’s ‘Finding Freedom’, and it is supposed to ‘dispel rumors about their relationship from both sides of the pond’. The…
