The third stage is belief in core values. They believe that punk values are more important than dress, looks etc. Their behaviour is individual ‘do it yourself’ creative expression. They value personal integrity, individualism, honesty, and being unique.
D (14 marks)
The aim of the research is to collect qualitative data on the social meanings that clubbers attach to dance music. I need to find out what clubbing means to the clubbers, and distinguish what values and identity standards they have, what values they have, if any, and what their style is or dress. My sample needs to be of male and female clubbers from a diverse range of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. This means it needs to be representative of male and females from all different types of class background and cultures. I need to collect qualitative data. This is data that can contain words, feelings and people’s opinions. It can provide my research with a much more in-depth picture of the social world.
The methods I intend to use are, unstructured interviews and participant observation, and also open questionnaires. This is a form of methodological pluralism. It will provide me with a fuller picture of social life within the clubs and also outside the clubs. It allows me to look at research from all angles. Unstructured interviews are a good way to get valid information as I can learn stuff that I may not have even thought about asking. Participant observation would be ideal to use in this type of research, as it will be very hard to do anything else than watch in a dance club, as there will be loud music and it wouldn’t be the ideal place to conduct an interview. Participant observation will be high in validity. This will give me a truer insight, as I will be able to see what people actually do rather than what they tell me they do.
I will distribute open-questioned questionnaires to university students closest to my area. I will do this so that I get more valid data from respondents who will go to clubs and will know a bit about dance music and clubs. I will distribute the questionnaires via the students union and could convince people to complete the questionnaires with the chance of winning a cash prize. Hopefully I would get a lot of students all wanting to win the prize. A good advantage of handing out questionnaires is that I can disperse to a big sample. It is also a fast way of getting data.
I will get my sample to observe from the two main ‘dance clubs’ in my town, ‘fusion’ and ‘K2’. As a nightclub is open to all I will expect to find a diverse range of people from all socio-economic backgrounds and ethnic backgrounds and a good mix of males and females. I will attend the clubs in my town on what I assume to be the busiest nights of the week, Friday and Saturday nights, this will give me a big sample. As I cannot be at the two clubs at the same time I will do ‘fusion’ one week and the ‘K2 the next. I could do this for several months as to get more valid information. By doing participant observation I will be able to see what they wear and say, and how they act in their natural environment of the clubbing community.
I will then from these clubs ask the D.J’s if I can perform interviews with them about clubbing and the social meanings they attach to dance music. This is a form of systematic sampling where I choose who I want to be in my sample. I will convince the D.J’s to do these interviews by offering them a reasonable sum of money for their time, and the funds for this will be from the guardian magazine. I am doing this with them, as they will know a lot about clubbing and dance culture as they will be around it a lot, and may be a part of that culture.
E (22 marks)
One disadvantage of participant observation is it can involve a certain amount of danger. Being in a club by myself observing what is going on is likely to attract sum negative attention. Another disadvantage is that it could also be costly, paying into clubs etc. It can also be time consuming. I cannot expect to gather reliable information from one weekend at a nightclub. I would need to go several times for it to be reliable as the more times I observe the more likely someone could go back and get similar results. I cannot expect either to gather valid information from a nightclub. For me to say that my findings are true I will have to check and re-check what I am seeing. It would not be safe to generalise my findings with the rest of the population. I am only observing two nightclubs in the town I live. These may not be typical of bigger dance clubs and the social meanings people attach here may be different from elsewhere. There may be ethical issues for observing the clubbers. It may be wrong to observe the people without their awareness or their say that it is ok to do so.
One problem with unstructured interviews is that there may be interviewer bias. This is unavoidable. I pay people to take part in my interviews. This could cause them to tell me things I want to hear as to get some money off me. My social characteristics of a non-clubbing type person may also affect what they tell me. They could not trust me and so won’t tell me personal information. They may not even like me and could tell me false information. This will affect the validity of the research, as I will not be getting true information from the respondent.
A disadvantage of questionnaires is that there is usually a low response rate. I have however introduced a cash prize to win for doing the questionnaire, however this could prove to be expensive, especially if hardly anyone returns the questionnaires back to me. This would also affect the representativeness of the research. With a low response rate it would be hard to get a good mix of people. The answers done by the students may be incomplete or false. This will affect the validity of my research as the students could be answering the questionnaire mainly for the prize and would not care about filling in a questionnaire properly.
The problem with my sample is that in the nightclub I cannot be sure I will get a representative mix of people. I cannot choose who attends the club so there is no possibility of me changing that. I choose the D.J’s from each of the club. The sample of D.J’s is likely to be all male, as a woman D.J is uncommon, and I cannot produce a representative sample from just two clubs. To overcome this I would have to increase my sample of clubs. I cannot also be aware of how good of an ethnic mix my questionnaires would go to in the students union of a near by university. My sample size is unsure as I cannot be aware of how many returns I get or how many get given out.
