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EK313 week 18/ unit 16 Young Lives - Coggle Diagram
EK313 week 18/ unit 16 Young Lives
Young Lives is an example of a research programme which uses
both quantitative and qualitative methods
to investigate its research questions.
https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1778168§ion=1.3
You can easily say that one school has more children in each class than another. But many of the areas in which researchers are interested are not easily measurable in this way. For example, imagine you wanted to find out whether children in the same two schools differed in their levels of self-esteem. In this case, you would need to work out first what is meant by 'self-esteem' (which is quite a broad and vague idea), before you could set out to determine whether it is possible to measure it, and if so, how.
https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1778168§ion=1.4
The process of turning fuzzy concepts like 'self-esteem' into a measurable form is known as '
operationalisation
'.
eg: one report from 2007 that says 55% of children in primary school are bullied, and another from 2008 that says 23% of children in primary school are bullied. This does not necessarily mean that bullying has decreased (although it may do) – it may well be that the two pieces of research had
different ways of measuring what counts as
bullying, or defined bullying in different ways. You can often find more details about this in the
original research article or report
.
often (although not always) impossible to research the entirety of the population you are interested in, and in this case you need to decide how to choose which members of the population to study. This is referred to as '
sampling
'.
try to select a sample which is representative of the total population by choosing cases randomly (although this can be difficult to achieve in practice, as you will see in the next activity). This is known as
'probability sampling',
https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1778168§ion=1.5
Measuring wellbeing
You may well have found this quite difficult. Well-being is an
increasingly popular term both among the general public and in academic and policy discussions
, and
may seem straightforward.
. [NO IT DOESN'T] . . .trying to define it in order to measure it, it becomes more complicated.
might not always coincide in the ways we might expect – for example, a child might report being happy with their life even though they are living in extreme poverty.
exactly- exemplifies that research is futile!!
https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1778168§ion=1.4.2
Many of these factors are in themselves difficult to measure. [eg] determining a child’s
self-esteem
might = completing a questionnaire which has been developed to measure this. . . useful information, but child might also want to represent her or himself in a particular way. For some things (such as social skills or educational achievement) you might think that it is not adequate, or not possible, to ask the child directly – you might want to ask their parents or teachers to give their assessment. But this might well be affected by the teacher’s own preconceptions or how well they know the child (different teachers might give different assessments of the same thing).
ideas also
differ between cultures and societies
, which can make cross-cultural research like the Young Lives project particularly
challenging
– when making comparisons between different countries, it is important to ascertain whether what is being compared is really the same in each country. Another factor to bear in mind is practicality: no research project could have the time or resources to research all the factors that could possibly contribute to well-being, so some of the aspects considered to be most important (or more easily measurable) must be chosen above others.
Chapter 14
Caine Rolleston
YL observational, does not involve interventions in their lives p,222
spanning period of Millenium development goals.(2000-2015)
3,000 kids in each (of 4 ) countries!!
aged 18 & 12 in 2013
3 rounds of household-level data: 2002, 2006 & 2009
Caine Rolleston argues that the key analytic advantages of the study design are that it enables researchers to measure change over time (as it is a longitudinal project), identify the causes of those changes, provide rich description and depth of explanation, and provide data for international comparison
. MM
https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1778168§ion=1.3.1
Two of the strengths of Young Lives is its integration of different methods and its ability to link the data from different methods together to provide a broader and more complete picture.
The ability to measure change over time is provided primarily by quantitative data – as you may have guessed from the use of the term 'measure'. Data for international comparison could be qualitative or quantitative, but is more likely to be quantitative as it tends to be easier to compare. The detailed and multilayered – or 'thick' – description and the depth of explanation, however, require qualitative data.
based on chapter 14 & Rolleston audio
https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1778168§ion=1.4.1
Caine explains how the complex subject of measuring school quality involves identifying two sets of indicators: ‘input’ and ‘output’ indicators. ‘Input’ indicators refer to what resources are added to the education system, such as financial resources, infrastructural resources and school materials, together with information about teacher qualification. 'Output' indicators – measuring what has been learned by children – include such measures as curriculum-related test exercises. It is not often possible in studies on school quality to establish the relationship between inputs and outputs,
Each country had different curricula and different policy contexts,
tension between selecting a statistically viable sample which was not only within the study’s budget but also feasible to manage given the geographic and infrastructural characteristics of the four countries and the degree of detail demanded by the research objectives.
Young Lives sample design document,
https://www.younglives.org.uk/sites/www.younglives.org.uk/files/GuidetoYLResearch-S5-Sampling.pdf
.
never designed to be nationally representative of children of a specific age,
‘an in-depth study of relationships between pieces of information, rather than an instrument to collect national statistical results’ (Wilson, Huttly and Fenn 2006: 358).
high proportion of poor children,
but which also included other children with whom their experiences could be compared. This was achieved by over-sampling poor areas, and then randomly selecting children of the right age within the selected communities.
within the available budget would have meant limiting the number of countries in the study.
I have some issue with 'rich' countries/ 'poor' countries. UK 'rich' but many poor children. Culturally 'progressive' and 'developed' but many children not nurtured/ encouraged.
constrained by practical factors of budget and geography.
https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=1778168§ion=1.5.1
eg. does a longer school day improve children's performance in mathematics?
We might then imagine that attending private school improves exam performance. But perhaps children at private school are also likely to have wealthier parents, and it is this which causes their higher performance in exams. These questions can be investigated through statistically 'controlling for' particular variables.
once again -research is flawed= pointless!!