Session 12: Thursday 31st October 15:30-17:00

Survey Methods and Quantitative Research

• Discussion of preliminary reading.
• How might the use of a small-scale survey or other quantitative methods contribute to your own study?

Preliminary Reading

SANDERSON, P. (2008). The arts, social inclusion and social class: the case of dance. British Educational Research Journal. 34(4). 467-490.
           
DOWLING, P.C. & BROWN, A.J. (2010). Doing Research/Reading Research: re-interrogating education. London. Routledge. c. 8.

Further Reading

SANDERSON, P. (2000). The Development of Dance Attitude Scales. Educational Research. 42(1): 91-99.
           
The review article investigates the relationship between social class and gender—as independent variables—and attitudes to dance amongst young people. The research employs a survey method. The research has involved a number of stages that also involve qualitative methods. The four Likert attitude scales were developed from statements collected from focus group interviews. These statements comprised a questionnaire that was distributed to an initial sample of secondary school aged students. The survey results were subjected to factor analysis that resulted in four attitude scales. These scales formed the basis of a new survey that was distributed to a larger, nationwide sample of students. This article reports on the findings from this second survey. Information on the generation of the scales can be found in Sanderson (2000), which is also included in the Dropbox folder. The article also mentions the possibility of a further qualitative study, though I can find no evidence that such a study was carried out. What is of interest, though, is that the article illustrates the potential benefit of sequencing qualitative and quantitative phases in research.

In reading the article, don’t get too hung up on the technical meanings of the statistical terms unless you already have expertise in this area; it is certainly not crucial that you understand the mathematical processes that were, in any case, carried out by computer. You should, though, try to gain a sense of the rationales for the various statistical techniques that are described. You should also address at least some of the following issues:

• What motivated the study?
• What are the research questions?
• What are attitudes?
• What is social class and how is it measured in this study?
• How is sex measured in this study?
• The statements used in the scales are derived from statements collected from young people and attitudes are measured on the basis of respondents’ responses to these statements: in what ways might this method be interpreted as limiting the validity of the survey findings in relation to the research question?
• What is a Likert scale?
• The article gives very few illustrations of questionnaire items (more are given in Sanderson (2000), but consider the processes that generated them.
• What are the statistics mean and standard deviation?
• What are F values, t-tests, p values used for?
• What is the meaning of statistical significance; when is a result statistically significant?
• What is Cronbach’s alpha used for?
• Consider the line of argument that is presented in the paper and how it relates to the methodological choices that have been made.
• Towards the end of the article the author presents some possible explanations for the findings of the survey: what are the bases for these explanations?

Key Methodological Terms