DOCUMENTS

Question 1

Gillborn (1995): Documents - Practical Issues

Answer 1

• Public docs on education r easily accessible; bc of gov policies emphasising parental choice, schools make a large amount of info available to the public
• Eg: Gillborn (1995): In his study of racism + schooling, was able to access wide range of docs which gave him ‘official’ picture of what was happening in terms of racism in schools he studied - compared this w data he collected from interviews + observations

Question 2

Gerwitz et al (1995): Documents - Practical Issues

Answer 2

• Public docs on education r easily accessible; bc of gov policies emphasising parental choice, schools make a large amount of info available to the public
  Gerwitz et al (1995): In their study of marketisation + education, found school brochures + prospectuses were a useful free source of info abt how schools presented themselves in education ‘marketplace’

Question 3

Hey (1997): Documents - Ethical Issues

Answer 3

• Ethical problems w personal docs of informed consent eg. Hey (1997) collected notes girls 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 + in one case, a teacher took them from the bin + offered them to her
• Hence, informed consent for their use wasn’t obtained

Question 4

Hey (1997): Documents - Representativeness

Answer 4

• Personal docs r often less representative eg. Hey collected about 70 notes but the unsystematic way in which she came by them makes it likely that her sample was unrepresentative

Question 5

Lobban: Documents - Reliability

Answer 5

• Some educational docs can also be used in ways that other researchers can replicate eg.
• Lobban examined 179 stories from 6 school reading schemes looking for gender stereotyping; analysed the content of each story using the same set of categories, counting no of times images fell into each category - future researchers can easily apply systematic content analysis of this kind to create comparative data from educational docs

Question 6

Hey (1997): Documents - Validity

Answer 6

• High validity: provide imp insights into meanings held by teachers + pupils eg. Hey initially examined girls’ friendships in schools thru observation + interviews but then realised she was ignoring a useful source of insight into girls’ feelings + actions (the notes they passed to each other in class)
• found they offered valuable insights into nature of girls’ friendships bc they were spontaneous expressions of the girls’ feelings + attitudes
• However all docs r open to diff interpretationseg. we can’t be sure Hey’s interpretation of the meaning of the notes is the same as the girls
• Bc the girls sometimes handed Hey the notes, it’s possible they were written w her in mind + may not be spontaneous