Maybe a cultural argument can be put forward as a number of sociologists say that the nature of family life influences levels of attainment amid ethnic minorities. It has been said that West Indians have a family life, which fails to encourage children to do well in education. It has been said that in Britain Afro-Caribbean’s have a high population of one-parent families and a high quota of working mothers who leave their children unattended in the early years of their childhood. It can be said that the concept of single parenthood is another thing that has an effect on the achievement of the Afro-Caribbean males. This can be linked to my objective on the Afro Caribbean culture having an influence on educational achievement.
In contrast to the views that Afro Caribbean parents do not encourage their children John Rex and Sally Tomlinson (1979) did a study in Birmingham and found that the majority of West Indian parents have great academic aspirations for their children. Although this study is slightly dated it may still hold relevance today. In a study of the amount of people that had made a recent visit to their child’s school. They found that out of the sample 89.1 per cent of the white adults had been 79 percent of the West Indians had visited, whereas 69.4 per cent of the Asians had. There was no proof that other groups had more interest in their children’s education. I aim to discover whether this is true or not and what my respondents feel about parental influence.
A recent article in 2002 by MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Diane Abbott involved her stating her views on the subject. Abbott’s argument is that “teachers are failing black boy’s”. Abbott refers to this as a silent catastrophe. She states that research shows that black boys need men in the classroom. She say’s that they do not see reading and writing as masculine or ‘cool’. This relates back to my objective on the laddish culture. Abbott says that black men are demonised in British society and for this reason black boys hold on to the notion of masculinity. Which Abbott states is about “bravado and violence”. The added factors of racism Abbott says adds to the underachievement.
The underachievement of Afro Caribbean boys can be put down to a number of factors. My focus is going to be mainly on the culture of West Indian families and if this plays a part. The effect of negative labelling from teachers and the laddish culture that Afro Caribbean boys may have adopted.
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Methodology
The principal method of research I will utilise is the use of semi-structured interviews. This will involve me executing a questionnaire pertaining to my research. This will allow me to influence the responses due to my presence. It will also allow me to make sure that the interview is completed according to the instructions. This will be a combination of both a positivistic and qualitative approach as the questions are open. This technique confirmed to be effective for Young and Willmott in their survey of family life.
My method of research is qualitative rather than quantitative. I will perform a pilot study on my sample group preceding my research. This will be necessary to make my study more reliable. The study will help me to understand my sample more and therefore gather better results. I will also be able to recognise any mistakes and amend them accordingly.
The sample group, which I will endeavour to study, would be Afro-Caribbean males in further education and also males that have left at the age of 16, as they are the ones who have potentially failed in the educational system. The males in further education will be asked what level they are studying at for example “level 1 foundation course” My sampling frame will embody 30 males. It would be favourable if the students were of the same class. Although this will be difficult, the issue of class would not confuse matters. If the sample were of a variety of classes then the results could be affected. I must be aware of this.
My main problem would be accessibility as gaining access to Afro-Caribbean males who have left school at the age of 16 may prove to be an obstacle. The only method around this would be snowball sampling to accumulate my sample. This would entail me speaking with Afro-Caribbean males and using them as my personal contacts to build up a sample of the group to be studied. This method would be the most practical as I can insure that I am following my sample group criteria and this promotes the accurateness of my analysis.
Interviewing, is a flexible method of research, which can be applied to extricate accurate data from a sample. This is where my choice for using semi-structured interviews comes into play as I can still elongate each question as greatly as I choose; in addition my research can be replicated for the sake of efficiency. I could ask the question “ What subjects are you studying?” and then I have the opportunity to probe the interviewee further by asking why they picked those subjects. I will also operationalise my concepts by making them easier for the respondent to understand.
I will tape record my interviews so that they can be done more naturally. This would also be helpful as I can go back over my information and accumulate material that I may have missed out that is relevant to my study. This will help me obtain more reliable results. The interview will also flow more effectively as I will not have to write everything down, as this is time consuming during an interview. The sample may reply to me more comfortably if they do not feel as if they are in an interview situation.
My research would also be quite small scale as my sample is not that large. This may produce imprecise results, as it would have to be done on a wider scale to be accurate. Therefore the representativeness of my study could be quite poor. However further research could be done to find out whether the study was correct or not.
As I am an Afro-Caribbean I should be able to obtain the confidence of the students. However it may become difficult to not lead them into answering questions in a particular way. There is a predicament with the fact that at times the males could be telling me untruths as boys have the tendencies to embellish at times to seem “rugged”. This could effect the validity if my data.
Time is going to be a supplementary problem as it is going to be very time consuming listening to the taped interviews. The interviews may also be quite prolonged, as they are quite informal. I will overcome this by only asking relevant information whilst probing.
I need to take into the consideration that I am an A level student and therefore I have limited time to undergo my study. My study will be more representative of the sixth form college than society as a whole.
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Evidence
I used semi-structured interviews to gather my research. I asked each person 17 questions. My evidence has both supported and challenged the contextual evidence that had been researched. One of the questions asked on my questionnaire was “What do you think influenced your achievement at GCSE” 15 of my respondents said that their parent or guardian had an influence on their achievement due to their concern for their education. Many felt that if their parents had not taken an interest they would have achieved much less.
This challenges the view that many Afro Caribbean children coming from one-parent families has a negative outcome education wise. My findings support the view of John Rex and Sally Tomlinson who found that the majority of West Indian parents have great academic aspirations for their children. This links to my objective on culture and whether or not the culture of West Indians leads to the underachievement in education. This can also be linked to my question on culture and educational achievement. As shown below:
Charles Murray in the underclass theory argues that children from single parent families are less likely to do well in education although this can be challenged maybe it is the culture of single parent families which influences them not their ethnic background. This view is supported by the fact that most of my respondents felt that their culture had no influence on their educational achievement. However it became obvious while doing my questionnaires that most of the respondents did come from one parent families and perhaps that part of the culture may be playing an underlying influence that the respondents may not have been knowledgeable of.
The views of Paul Willis were supported and yet challenged in this study as when asked if they thought their friends influenced them, the majority of the Afro Caribbean boys I interviewed said yes. I had assumed that they had been influenced in a negative way however many of them were influenced positively by studying so that they didn’t take the same route as their underachieving peers. This links to my objective on the laddish culture as the friends generally just talked and “played about” in class. However many of my respondents were not influenced in a negative way by it. The results of this question are shown below.
Due to the outcome of these results I feel it is necessary to take the investigation into this question further and discuss whether the influence of their peers was positive or negative. Rather than just finding out if they were influenced as the results are not clear enough to build a proper conclusion without doing so.
In light of the fact that 6 of the respondents said that their friends influenced them in a positive way we can say that 15 of the students did well regardless of their peers. That is half of my sample and subsequently it can be said that Willis’ study on the laddish culture is neither supported or challenged as there is a 50% split amongst the respondents as to whether they did well or badly due to their peers.
The achievement of the parent of the respondent can be related to my objective on culture. My aim was to find out if their achievement had an influence on their child. Therefore the question “How far in education have your parents been?” allowed me to make an association between the parents and their son and see if there are any trends.
Many of my respondents did not know how far in education their parents had been especially with their fathers. This could mean that they had not discussed their educational background with their child. From the parents that we found out about it can be seen that a minority of them only went to secondary school. And the majorities have been to further or higher education. We can see that more of the mothers went to college than university. This was on the contrary to the fathers. However the results are not completely reliable, as there are many of the fathers we do not know about.
We can also draw the conclusion that some of the Afro Caribbean boys underachievement was due to them as when asked the question “Did you revise for your GCSEs?” 7 of the respondents answered yes and 23 of them answered no. The males that responded “No” included boys that lived with both parents and thought that their culture and their friends had no influence on their educational achievement. There could be many reasons for this for example this could be due to the school they attended or just down to the individual. In addition to this the question of validity crops up as it could be possible that the respondents wanted to appear “macho” and telling me that they revised could threaten their masculinity.
Question 11 and 12 in my questionnaire related to my objective on labelling. Question 11 being “Where you put into different groups based on your ability? If so how did it effect your educational achievement?” 4 of the respondents said that they were not placed in groups where 26 of them said that they were. This question was open-ended so I obtained a variety of responses from my sample. The response to this question was mainly based on the individual, as streaming seemed to have a different effect on different people. Some of the respondents that were placed in the higher groups said that it gave them confidence knowing that they were one of the smartest in the school. On the other hand though many people placed in higher groups still said that it did not make a difference what stream they were placed in. Hargreaves views have been supported in the study as a lot of the students placed in the lower stream felt extremely discouraged which resulted in them not doing as well. The respondents said this was due to the fact that they believed the teachers thought they were “dumb” and therefore they thought there was no point in working if this was the case. This also links to Becker’s views on labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy the students felt labelled as “dumb” and therefore they conformed to this view of them.
Question 12 in my survey was “Do you think there is a difference between the way that boys and girls are treated in education?” Many of my respondents could not answer as they attended a boy’s school and therefore did not have many interactions with females in education. However out of the males that did attend mixed schools many of them said that the females were treated better as they were thought of to be more hard working, independent and sensible. They believed that the teachers thought that the boys were time wasters. This links strongly to my objective on labelling. However the issue of reliability becomes a factor as most of my respondents attended boys schools, therefore I was not able to gather a large enough sample of people that could comment on the treatment of boys and girls in education and how it varies.
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Evaluation
The method of research I used was semi-structured interviews. It proved to be quite successful as I feel I obtained most of the necessary information required to undertake my study sufficiently.
My pilot study was not as useful as I would have liked. The purpose of my pilot study was to see if I needed to make any amendments to my method of research or any of the questions I asked. However when I came to do my study I discovered that many people did not understand question 17 “What do you think the major factors are influencing educational achievement?” For this reason I had to explain the question to them, this may have resulted in my results being slightly invalid. Although I tried to keep my explanation as similar as possible some people needed more explaining than others and this may have resulted in too much probing.
I found that question 4 “How many A*s – Cs did you achieve?” may have had some ethical issues. As many of my respondents were touchy towards this question. Therefore maybe I should have been more sensitive. Some of the respondents acted as if they had forgotten. I then probed them and asked them to try and remember, at this point they generally told me. However there is a possibility that this number may have been false as they may have been embarrassed about their results. Another problem with this question was that some of my respondents achieved no A*s – Cs and after posing them with the question the interview became slightly awkward due to this I do not think I gathered as much information from those respondents which effects the reliability of my study.
The representativeness of my study was effected due to the fact that I could have had a larger sample. If my sample was larger I could have obtained more representative results. This would result in my data being more reliable. An additional factor that influenced the representativeness of my data was the fact that I had trouble finding boys that were not in some form of education. Eventually I was only able to find 2 even through the method of snowballing. This was not a good sample as the boys that are not in education are the ones who have actually “failed”.
I also feel that the validity of the data may not have been as accurate as it should have been due to the fact that many of my interviews took place in the student common room. This was a noisy environment, which could have affected the outcome of the interview. In addition to this people were around the respondent that they knew. This could have acted as a distraction for them, which may have resulted in inaccurate data. Therefore a recommendation for a future study would be that the interviews took place in a quiet lonely environment with no distractions. I would also need to focus on a particular age group of boys as some of my respondents where in further education subsequently they found it difficult remembering their time at school. This could effect the reliability of my study.
An additional problem would be the fact that my method did not involve speaking to the parents of the students. Therefore I could not find out whether there is a difference in the way Afro-Caribbean parents view education. This would have been useful to my study as this may effect the behavioural patterns of their sons. However my method only obtained one viewpoint. This could have affected the reliability of the study
In conclusion my major objectives were culture and whether it has an influence on the achievement of Afro Caribbean boys. The labelling theories effect on their attainment and whether there is a laddish culture amongst Afro Caribbean boys, which could be a reason for their under-achievement. From the study it can be ascertained that culture does not have an effect on educational achievement however the case may be that it does, however the respondents may not have knowledge of it. I feel that from the study we can draw the conclusion that labelling is an issue. As the students response to streaming was based largely on what level they were placed at. Hargreave’s and Becker’s views on labelling and the self-fulfilling prophecy were strongly supported in this case as most of the respondents placed in the lower stream felt very disheartened as they did not think they belonged there. They took the streaming as a personal attachment given to them as being “dumb” and therefore they failed to work. Finally the issue of there being a laddish culture amongst Afro Caribbean boys is both supported and challenged. As many of the boys say that their friends did influence them to do bad things however on the contrary a large amount of respondents said that they either influenced them in a positive way or not at all.
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