My data that I will use will come from a questionnaire so therefore the data I will use is quantitative but also I will have a little bit of qualitative data as I have one opened ended questions. The reason I have chosen also to obtain some qualitative data as using qualitative data is more appropriate for questions I have asked about the meaning and what religion means to the individual.
Most my questions are closed ended and most closed ended questions which gather quantitative data so as my questionnaire mainly has closed ended questions most my data is quantitative. I mainly used closed needed questions as they are easy and quick to fill out, if questionnaires take long to fill out must people will not bother to fill it al out so therefore to ensure I get completed questionnaire back mainly chose close ended questions. If people did not return questionnaire I would not be able to fulfil and find out my aim, so by getting completed questionnaires back it is helping me reach my aim.
I will gain consent for the research to be ethical and make sure he research participant knows the information will be kept confidential. No harm will be caused. Asking about peoples religiousness s considered quite personal for some people, and may also cause embarrassment e.g. if they are not very religious this may cause them embarrassment, so this is why it was very paramount I gained consent.
The main concept to be operationalised here is religiosity. I am trying to see if religion amongst British Pakistanis has declined. To operationalise this I need to make a questionnaire that will ask questions that will test religiosity. The way my questions will do this is for example question seven which asks how many times a person goes to their religious building if I see the number of people is in the decline this may indicate religion is on the decline too. Like above the number of church goers is shown, throughout a few years-this is showing if religion is on the decline over the years. I have operationalised religiousness in terms of practice and importance. Practice refers to how often the person does things e.g questions 5, 6, 7 and 8. Importance refers to the meaning of religion in person’s life e.g questions 2, 3 and 4.
I am going to ask 20 people a maximum of 10 questions each. The reason why I am keeping the maximum number of questions is 10 because people don’t really like to fill in questionnaire and if the questionnaire does not contain too many questions, others are more likely to fill it in.
The questions I am going to ask are as following:
- What age category do you fit in?
- Do you consider yourself to be religious?
- How important do you think religion is to you?
- Does religion influence the decisions in your daily life?
- Does your religion prohibit any activities?
- If you’ve answered yes to question 5 then please give details.
- How many times a week do you go to your religious building?
- How many times a week do you read your religious book?
- How important do you think religion is in society on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being not important and 10 being extremely important?
Questions 1-8 will have tick boxes.
I will sample 20 people. 10 will be over 40 years old and 10 will be under 20 years old in order to be able to make comparisons between generations.
The sample technique I will use to obtain these 20 people is opportunity sample, this means I will simply select people that are free and available to take part, this will help make selecting the people easier. As my research is on British Pakistanis only I will not need to make sure I have lots of different ethnic minorities, which you usually would have to make sure you have. It does not matter what class the people I give my questionnaire too are because what I am testing does not require a particular class. Age does matter- I can’t have all of the people at the same age and will need some under 20’s and 10 over 40’s as my aims is to ask 10 older and 10 younger people about their religious practices and beliefs and to compare the results amongst the too. 20 is not a huge amount of people, so therefore the results obtained will not be very representative. From my pilot study I will not be able to generalise ether as my sample is not big and to be able to generalise you need a large sample or the results can be representative. It does not really matter what gender I choose as I am not making any comparisons between the two genders so therefore it does not matter how many of each gender I choose. For ethnicity I must ensure all the people I give my questionnaire too are British Pakistani as my pilot study is based on British Pakistanis only. It does not matter if I don’t have an assortment of ethnicity as the only one I am interested in for my pilot study is British Pakistanis.
The way I found the 20 Pakistani people I sampled was really easy for me as my Parents are from Pakistani ethnic background so I know lots of Pakistanis that could fit in each age category I needed, so I simply emailed them or gave them my questionnaire to fill in.
Research findings
I found out the age group 20 onwards are less religious but especially the 40 +group and I found the group of people under 20 more religious. My aim was to ask 10 people under 20 years old and 10 people under 40 years old and compare the two sets and see which ones are more religious. I thought the older group of 40 year old plus would be more religious however I found out quite the opposite and found the ages 20 and under so much more religious then the 40 years old and over. Most people I asked my questionnaire to thought they were religious.
One questionnaire was opened ended, where people could write their own answer, this helped gain qualitative data Most people gave similar answers when asked if your religions prohibits certain activities what are they. Their answers included drinking, premarital sex, boyfriend gambling, mortgage, listening to music, lying, backbiting, slandering, alcohol, not allowed to eat pork, abortion , interest/loans, gossiping, wearing tight clothes, flirting, mixed discos I noticed all people responses were similar this also helps proves that most people I asked the questionnaire were religious.
I thought this question was a rather important one, so made a pie chart out of it so that I can present the results in a clearer way, which helps see what the questions is asking in a better way. From this I can tell a lot of people probably were religious as most of them said religion effects the decisions they make in their lifes and if someone was not religious it would not effect the decisions they make in life.
I thought the above question was another really paramount one to find out if religion had declined. From the graph we can see most people ticked the option of not visiting their religious building at all during the week, this supports religion is on the decline. The reason why I have done two bar charts net to each other in a different colour is so that I can compare between the two generations which was one of my aims to do so this type of bar chart helps me makes comparisons.
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Evaluation
I found out the majority of people in my pilot study were religious as you can see from question 4, as majority said yes religion does influence the decisions they make it tells me most of them are religious as if they were not religious they would not follow what they religions says and it would not effect them in making decisions, one my aims was to ask to younger and 10 older people about their religious beliefs and practises and beliefs and another was to compare the results between the two sets of people and what I found was the younger generation are more religious then the older, which I found surprising as I thought the older generation would be more religious.
I used a questionnaire only to find out my aims. My method chosen was a good way to find out my aims. I think my pilot study would be good to start a full scale study on the same topic, as I found out some good results from my pilot study.
As I used the questionnaire method the validity of my research was really weak, perhaps another method would have produced more valid results. Although using the questionnaire method was a good way to obtain my aim the weakness of this method was that my results obtained were not very valid as using the questionnaire method does not produce valid results. So to get more valid results, a different method should have been chosen. However I think using the questionnaire methods was the best methods to find my aim. If I did a interview with the people it might not be reliable as people might not tell the truth-this could also happen with using questionnaires however people are more like to feel more anonymous when filling out questionnaires rather then having personal interviews. I did however use one open ended question which helped me obtained some valid results. It helped me compare between the two generations and this was one of my aims so it helped me achieve this. I found out from this question the various activates prohibited from the respondents religion.
My research was quite reliable as responses to most my questions it involved box ticking however I may have had an affect on the respondents and respondents may give answers I expect maybe as I have a religious appearance however if I did not dress so religiously it may also have influenced the respondents so it’s impossible to stay neutral by this I mean it is impossible not to do anything which may influence the
My pilot study was very ethical as I got consent for the research and no harm/embarrassed was caused and confidentiality was kept. However some may have felt embarrassment from asking about their religious beliefs.
The concept I wanted to operationalised was religious and I think in my pilot study this was done extremely well and I don’t think it cold be done better it anyways I think it was done well enough already.
I only used the questionnaire method which worked really effectively. If I turned this pilot study into a full scaled study the thing I would change is ethnicity. Currently I have only asked British Pakistanis and compared the religiousness between the older and younger generation however if I did this on a full scale I would ask different ethnicity groups, so a caparison between different ethnicity religiousness can be made, this would also produce better results which would be better for making generalisations, also if this pilot study turned into a full scaled one I would sample a lot more people.
I only sampled 20 people so my research is not very representative so therefore I cannot make generalise from it. For my result to be more reliable and representative I should have sampled more then 20 people. It was not reliable as respondents were all from different class, all various ages, ethnic group was only Pakistanis, the gender was all female. Also all my respondents were all Muslims all these factors make my research very biased so therefore my results were not representative. A scientific sampling method like random sampling would get a proper representative sample, as you would get the same amount of people from the different classes, ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds. If this method is used then only could the results be generalised to the Pakistani British populations.
Then I would also be able to generalise from my results. So to improve I would sample more people to obtain getter results. Also the people chosen to take part were chosen by opportunity sample which is not a good way of getting representative results to make the pilot study more representative the sample of people should have be chosen using cage (class, age .gender, ethnicity) al these factors should have been considered before I sampled and equal amounts of people who fit each category should be taken.
No there not really issues of being fair-it was easy to choose 10 younger generation and 10 older generation. However fairness might have been more of an issue if I used class, age, gender and ethnicity to sample.
I think my pilot study reached the two aims of my study effectively.