Why this is an important issue in Britain today:
- This is an important issue in Britain because parents expectations of children affect how there children achieve in education.
- This is an important issue in Britain because we see what different ethnic groups expect from there children, and how they perform in education because of these expectations.
- This is an important issue in Britain because gender roles are different for boys, from parents, then girls as they are expected to achieve in education, due to tradition.
Methodology
To find my own primary data I am going to design a questionnaire to find out who Bengali parents have higher expectations of there sons or there daughters, some advantages of using a questionnaire are that they are relatively cheap, quick and efficient way of obtaining large amounts of information from large amounts of people, this is particular with postal questionnaire which can be posted anywhere. They also provide quantitative data, which is data in statistical form, using this statistical data, it is possible to measure the connection between different factors that you are investigating. Because the questions that are asked are standardized, the questionnaire can be done again to check for reliability of the information.
Some of the disadvantages of using questionnaires are postal questionnaires have a usually low response rate and those who do reply may not be representative of the population that is under study. Because of this problem, it may prove difficult to generalize accurately or draw general conclusions from the sample of respondents to the population as a whole. Also we can actually never be sure that the right person has filled in the questionnaire, as someone else may have sent it in as a joke.
This method best suits my hypothesis because we can ask a wide number of people from the Bengali population, and we can replicate them and send them out again to check for reliability, and because it is a questionnaire, a researcher is not present, so people may fell more comfortable to answer questions that are more personal.
The method I decided not to use to collect primary data is interviews because I felt that it would not help my research. I think this because, in an interview, you could produce lots of qualitative information, but they are very time consuming and the interviewee may feel embarrassed to answer personal questions to someone. Also they give data that is harder to compare, unlike questionnaires that are easy to compare to check for reliability.
Informal interviews are very time consuming and expensive, which means that less interviews can be done, making for smaller samples and they have no set questions to follow, so it may prove difficult to replicate an interview, so it is not possible to check for reliability of the population under study.
Ethical issues are about keeping sensitive information confidential and making sure that the information is only used for research and nothing else.
As a researcher, I must try to keep information confidential; not share it with anyone, keep the questionnaires anonymous by not asking for the respondents name and to be present when the questionnaire is being completed to help the respondent if they do not understand any questions, I may also not be present if the respondent is answering a personal question and want to be alone.
