It is my hypothesis that the recent improvement of girls in educational attainment has been caused by changing attitudes and aspirations in females.

Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC). The study involved focus groups,

in which children were asked many different questions in a

classroom-type setup. The questions were based around the subject of

changing attitudes amongst the sexes. One girl was recorded to say

"Nowadays women have got more courage, if they are determined to do

something they will go out and do it. In the past they wouldn't have

had the security, support or enough confidence."

The statement shows that young people in the focus groups

knew that they had more opportunities than earlier generations, and

expected equality as a right.

`Gender' is a crucial concept, and is relevant to my hypothesis as I

am exploring a gender issue. As a sociological term, gender is defined

as `the way society expects people to behave on the basis of their

physical difference'. The dictionary definition is `sex as expressed

by social and cultural distinctions'. Sex and gender are two different

things, as sex looks at the biological features of society, whereas

gender is based around other factors and characteristics, such as

roles within a family etc.

My second context is `Aspiration'. It is defined as `a strong desire

to achieve an end; an ambition'. Aspirations depend hugely on cultural

and historical context, as different cultures have different beliefs

and ambitions, and obviously due to peoples targets becoming higher

and higher over the years. In relation to my hypothesis, it is the

main aspect of my study, as I belief it is the change in the

aspirations among females which has made them improve in education

recently.

Main Research Methods and Reasons

I shall go about my research by carrying out semi-structured

interviews, with a mixture of open and closed questions. This will

mean I will conduct the survey face to face. Some questions will allow

the respondents to answer in their own words (open questions), and

some questions will ask the respondent to choose from a pre-compiled

list of possible answers. By conducting the survey face-to-face, this

will avoid the problem of non-response and allow me to explain

anything not understood. All the respondents will be asked the same

set questions. This will be useful to my study, as the data collected

from the research will be easy to document and present. Due to the

fact that I am using both open and closed questions, the research will

be both qualitative and quantitative. This method has practical

advantages, as it will not be very costly to carry out, and I have

very good access to my target audience.

My target population will consist of girls in higher education. This

relates to my hypothesis as I am attempting to study girls, and girls

that are in higher education are more mature and will be able to give

me a better response. I intend to gain a sample frame consisting of

from people from my college, and then use a stratified random method.

This will mean that I can randomly select girls from my college to

take out my research on. I intend on sampling roughly 30 girls. I

chose this figure as it would gain a broad response, but at the same

time it would not be overly time consuming to carry out the research.

In order to gain the most general and broad response I must take into

consideration variables such as class and ethnicity. It would be a

bias study if I were to merely use, for example, middle-class white

girls, as I would not be focusing on a broad enough basis. And so I

feel it is important to have a range of ethnicity and social class

within my sample group.

The kind of questions that I ask will generally be ones which prompt

the respondent to inform me of their general attitude towards their

education, and where their priorities lie. For example, as a closed

question I could ask: "what is your main priority within the following

list: marriage, future employment, children, other (please state)".

This would give me a general indication as to where girls' priorities

lie. I could also ask questions in order to find out their current

employment etc, so that I can gain a figure of how many of these girls

are employed already, and what kind of employment they are in. In this

case, I do not think that a pilot study is required.

Potential Problems

One problem that may occur with my research method is that the

respondents may not answer the question truthfully. It is quite normal

for people to lie/twist the truth in surveys, and if this does occur,

it will mean that my results will be inaccurate. There is always this

problem of validity, and it is one that is unavoidable.

There may also be a problem with the closed questions in the

interviews. It is obvious that complex social reality cannot be

entirely accurate within tick-box answers, as there is far more to it

than a statement. Despite the fact that closed question answers would

be easy to document and display, they don't really cater for the

complexity of `real-life'.

Some questions may be difficult for some respondents to answer, and

some respondents may not wish to answer certain questions. Of course,

I cannot force participants to answer questions, and so this will

leave me with blanks, and the final documentation of the data

collected from the study could possibly be inaccurate and difficult to

present.

It is not possible for me to know the relevant answers from the

outset. Two peoples answers to the same question could be entirely

different, which would mean that I would have trouble documenting the

data at the end. This is an unavoidable problem for me, as I cannot

influence respondents answers, due to the fact that this would create

an entirely biased study.