Module 1: What is Educational Inquiry?

Activity 1: Dipping my toe in the water

Activity 1 was all about being introduced to Educational Inquiry. Chapter 1 of the set text –The basics of social research (Babbie, 2008) Is all about introducing the idea of Human Inquiry and Science.

I really enjoy Babbie’s style of writing. He has a dry sense of humor that is apparent throughout the book. I found his discussion on how we know what we know to be very interesting. I’d never labeled the fact that most of what I know, has come through what I’ve been told or what is sociably agreeable. As humans we are very trusting, probably a good thing too, otherwise each of us would spend most of our lives trying to discover things that were already ‘known’.
Babbie (2008) Discusses and defines variables, attributes as well as qualitative and quantitative data. My task was to answer a couple of questions relating to these definitions.
https://mylo.utas.edu.au/webct/urw/lc20934.tp0/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct

Identify a social problem that you feel ought to be addressed and solved. What are the variables represented in your description of the problem? Which of those variables would you monitor in determining whether the problem was solved?

I chose an educational issue: Students that don't reach literacy benchmarks in grade 5/7
The variables involved could be:
-Gender-Socio Economic Status
-Occupation of parents
-Being read to in the home
-School
-Teaching pedagogy
-School Attendance
-Age child first attended school/play group/pre kinder etc.

I would find it interesting to measure the Occupation of the Parents and see if this impacted on literacy levels. Whether the child was read to in the home would be another interesting variable to consider, however a much harder one to measure or quantify.

Question 3: Suppose you were interested in studying the quality of life among elderly people, what quantitative and qualitative indicators might you examine?

Quantitative indicators:
-Number of persons on a pension/self funded
-Number of visits from family/friends
-Number of social activites
-Number of Elderly in homes/independant/living with family
- Compare results on physical/Mental health against this data

Qualitative:
-Social Life
-Friendships
-Relationships
-Well-being - all areas
-Thoughts on quality of life

My Quantitative data collection and analysis would involve close questioned surveys and responses that could be counted and graphed. The qualitative data would consist of open-ended interview questions, or other such methods that would extract more opinion and feeling rather than data and numbers.