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Paul Willis (1977)
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This Marxist sociologist, in 'Learning to Labour', used group interviews as part of his research into the 'lads' and schooling, to understand working-class boys' attitudes to education: -He studied a core group of 12 working-class boys in a Midlands secondary school. -He argued that 'these lads' formed distinctive 'counter-school sub-cultural grouping' characterised by opposition to the values and norms perpetuated throughout the school. -The group of disaffected boys felt superior to the more conformist pupils who they disparagingly labelled as 'ear oles'. -They showed little interest in their academic work, preferring instead to amuse themselves as best they could through various forms of deviant behaviour in which 'having a laff' became the main objective of the school day. -The lads also tried to identify with the adult, non-school world, by smoking, drinking, and expressing strongly sexist and racist attitudes. -Academic work had no value for these boys who had little interest in gaining qualifications and saw manual work as superior to mental work.
Evaluation: -This study had a very small sample size - unlikely to be representative. -The study is unlikely to be unreliable due to its unstructured group interview nature. |
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Harvey & Slatin (1976)
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These sociologists examined whether teachers had preconceived ideas about pupils of different social classes: -They used a sample of 96 teachers. -Each teacher was shown 18 photographs of children from different social class backgrounds. -To control other variables, the photographs were equally divided in terms of gender and ethnicity. -The teachers were asked to rate the children on their performance, parental attitudes to education, aspirations and so on. -They found that lower-class children were rated less favourably, especially by more experienced teachers. -Teachers based their ratings on the similarities they perceived between the children in the photographs and pupils they had taught. -This study indicates that teachers label pupils from different social classes and use these labels to pre-judge pupils' potential. |
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Michael Rutter (1979)
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This sociologist used questionnaires to collect large quantities of data from 12 inner London secondary schools: -From this, he was able to correlate achievements, attendance, and behaviour with variables such as school size, class size and number of staff. It would have been very difficult to do this with more labour-intensive methods such as interviewing or observation.
Evaluation: -The data provided correlations between variables such as class size and achievement, but not explanations for these correlations. |
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Edward Mason (1973)
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This sociologist looked at whether negative or positive expectations of pupils had the greater effect: -Teachers were given positive, negative or neutral reports on a pupil. -The teachers then observed video recordings of the pupil taking a test, watching to see if any errors were made. -Finally, they were asked to predict the pupil's end of year attainment. -He found that the negative reports had a much greater impact than the positive ones on the teachers' expectations. |
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Louis Theroux (2007)
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This person, in his documentary 'The Most Hated Family in America' conducted overt participant observation with the Westboro Baptist Church.
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Shere Hite (1991)
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This sociologist sent out 100,000 questionnaires for her study of 'love, passion and emotional violence' in America, but only 4.5% of them were returned.
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Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968)
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These sociologists conducted a field experiment titled, 'Pygmalion in the Classroom': -They carried out their research in a California elementary school they called 'Oak School'. -Pupils were given an IQ test and teachers were told that this had enabled the researchers to identify the 20% of pupils who were likely to 'spurt' in the next year. -In reality, the test did no such thing and the pupils were, in fact, selected at random. -They had 2 aims; the first to plant in the minds of the teachers a particular set of expectations and the second, to see if this had any effect on pupil performance. -Because the 'spurters' were selected at random, there was no reason to expect their performance would be any different to others in the class unless teacher expectations had an influence. -'Teachers expectations' was therefore limited as the independent variable in their experiment. -All the pupils were re-tested 8 months later and then again after a further year. -Over the first 8 months, pupils gained on average 8 IQ points, but the 'spurters' gained 12 points. -When this was broken down by age, the greatest improvement in performance was found in the youngest children, those aged 6-8. -However, after a further year, this 'expectancy' advantage only seemed to have an effect among 10-11 year-olds.
Evaluations: -While the 'spurters' benefitted from the study, the remaining 80% of pupils did not. Some may even have been held back educationally because they received less attention and encouragement from teachers. -Children have more rights today than in the 1960s and the legal duty of care that schools have today means that such an experiment is unlikely to be carried out now. -They had to deceive the teachers. Had the teachers known the true nature of the IQ test and the purpose of the research, it would have been impossible to plant expectations in their minds and the experiment would have failed in its purpose. -It was relatively simple and easy to repeat. Within 5 years of the original study, it had been repeated no less than 242 times. However, given all the many differences between school classes, for example, in terms of the age of the pupils, teaching styles and so on, it is unlikely that the original could be replicated exactly. -They claimed that teachers' expectations were passed on through differences in the way they interacted with pupils. However, the researchers did not carry out any observation of classroom interaction, so they had no data to support this claim. -Later studies that did use observation, such as Claiborn (1969), found no evidence of teachers' expectations being passed on through classroom interaction. -They did look at the whole labelling process from teacher expectations through to their effect on pupils, rather than just examining single elements in isolation. -Their study was longitudinal, which allowed them to identify trends over time. |
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Connor & Dewson (2001)
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These sociologists posted nearly 4,000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions around the country in their study of the factors influencing the decisions of working-class students to go to university.
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Elton Mayo (1927)
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This researcher began research into factors affecting workers' productivity at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne plant: -Working with 5 volunteer workers who knew he was conducting an experiment, he altered different variables such as lighting, heating, rest breaks and so on to see what effect they had on the volunteers' output. -Surprisingly, not only did output go up when he improved their working conditions, but it continued to rise even when conditions were worsened. -He concluded that workers were not responding to the changes he was making in the experimental variables, but simply to the fact that they were being studied and wished to please the experimenter. |
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Charkin et al. (1975)
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These sociologists used a sample of 48 university students who each taught a lesson to a 10 year old boy: -1/3 (the high expectancy group) were told that the boy was highly motivated and intelligent. -1/3 (the low expectancy group) were told that he was poorly motivated with a low IQ. -1/3 were given no information. -They videoed the lessons and found that those in the high expectancy group made more eye contact and gave out more encouraging body language than the low expectancy group.
Evaluations: -They used real pupils which raises ethical concerns, as young people's vulnerability and their more limited ability to understand what is happening mean that there are greater problems of deception, lack of informed consent and psychological damage. These ethical concerns are a major reason why laboratory experiments play only a limited role in educational research. -Although they identified the existence of positive and negative body language, they did not examine how it might then affect pupils' performance. |
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David Rosenhan (1973)
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This field experiment, named 'pseudopatient' experiment, researchers presented themselves at 12 California mental hospitals, saying they had been hearing voices. Each was admitted and diagnosed as schizophrenic: -Once in hospital, they ceased to complain of hearing voices and acted normally. -Nonetheless, hospital staff treated them as if they were mentally ill - none was found out. -This suggests that it was not the patients' behaviour that led to them being treated as sick, but the label 'schizophrenic' itself that led staff to treat them in this way.
Evaluation: -His study shows the value of field experiments - they are more 'natural', valid and realistic and they avoid the artificiality of laboratory experiments. -However, the more realistic we make the situation, the less control we have over the variables that might be operating. If so, we can't be certain that the causes wee have identified are the correct ones. |
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Stanley Milgram (1974)
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This sociologist, in one of his famous studies of obedience to authority with a laboratory experiment, lied to his research participants about the purpose of the research, telling them that they were assisting in an experiment on learning, in which they were ordered by the researcher to administer electric shocks when the learner failed to answer questions correctly.
His actual purpose of the experiment was to test people's willingness to obey orders to inflict pain. Unbeknown to his research participants, no electric shocks were actually used: -He found that 65% of them were prepared to administer shocks of 450 volts.
Evaluations: -His experiment caused harm to many of the research participants, who were observed to 'sweat, stutter, tremble, groan, bite their lips and dig their nails into their flesh. Full-blown, uncontrollable seizures were observed for three subjects.' -It is argued that the experiments can be justified ethically because they alert us to the dangers of blindly obeying authority figures. 74% of his participants said afterwards that they had learned something of lasting value. |
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Emile Durkheim (1897)
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This functionalist sociologist used the comparative method to study suicide: -His hypothesis was that low levels of integration of individuals into social groups caused high rates of suicide. -He argued that Catholicism produced higher levels of integration than Protestantism. -From this, he therefore predicted that Protestants would have a higher suicide rate than Catholics. -He then tested this prediction by comparing the suicide rates of Catholics and Protestants who were similar in all other important aspects (for example, in terms of where they lived, whether they were married or single, etc.). -His prediction was supported by the official statistics, which showed Catholics to have lower suicide rates.
Evaluations: In seeking to discover cause-and-effect relationships, the comparative method: -Avoids artificiality. -Can be used to study past events. -Poses no ethical problems, such as harming subjects.
As a positivist sociologist, he saw statistics as a valuable resource for sociologists: -Positivists take for granted that official statistics are 'social facts'; that is, true and objective measures of the real rate of crime, suicide etc. -They see sociology as a science and, just like natural scientists, they develop hypotheses to discover the causes of the behaviour patterns that the statistics reveal. -Positivists often use official statistics to test their hypotheses - this sociologist put forward the hypothesis that suicide is caused by a lack of social integration. -Using the comparative method, he argued that Protestant and Catholic religions differ in how well they integrate individuals into society. -Using official suicide statistics, he was able to show that Protestants had a higher suicide rate than Catholics, and so was able to argue that this statistical evidence proved his hypothesis correct. |
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Young & Willmott (1962)
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These sociologists approached 987 people for their main sample using structured interviews, only 54 refused to be interviewed: -This may be because people find it harder to turn down a face-to-face request, and some may welcome the opportunity to talk. |
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James Patrick (1973)
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This sociologist used covert participant observation to study a gang in Glasgow: -He became a member of the gang, because he looked quite young and knew one of its members from having taught him in approved school (now called young offenders' institutions). -The gang member who got him in (Tim) protected him whenever he could, including when the gang became suspicious that the researcher didn't want to carry a weapon when the gang engaged in fights with rivals. -He was almost found out when he bought his suit with cash instead of credit and when he fastened the middle button of his jacket rather than the top one - things the gang would never have done. -In an expected fight, the gang handed him an axe to use. Polsky warns that, 'You damned well better not pretend to be "one of them" because they will test this claim out and you will either find yourself involved in illegal activities, or your cover will be blown.'. -He left the gang quickly when the violence became too unacceptable for him, and he felt threatened. -He did not write his field notes until after the research. -By memory after the events, he reproduced rich data on the speech and ways of the gang. -He published his research in 1973, as 'A Glasgow Gang Observed', almost 10 years after he conducted it, since he was afraid of the gang and also wanted to protect their identities. |
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