Educational - Research Paper Example

These topics were as following: their family situation, employment, their non-educational activities, financial security, their evaluation of the quality of education and their opinion concerning social services and support. The results of the research showed that more students with advantage surroundings had the parents with higher education, compared with the students from disadvantage surroundings. On the contrary, the students from disadvantage surroundings revealed a stronger tendency to be involved into paid employment.

As the result, the students with disadvantage surroundings were less involved into non-educational activity, and less time was devoted to the communication by these students. The research also demonstrated equal results as regards to the questions of the education quality and financial concerns. Basing upon the results of the research the authors suggest necessary changes that are to be carried out to provide more favourable conditions for the students with disadvantage backgrounds. The research approach (methodology/technique) used by the author is cohort study, carried out with the help of questionnaire.

The types of study are as follows: longitudinal study, cohort study, cross sectional study, and trend study. The definition of the cohort study is as follows(Cohen et al, 2000): Where successive measures are taken at different points in time from the same respondents, the term 'follow up study' or 'cohort study' is used in the British literature. In a cohort study a specific population is tracked over a specific period of time but selective sampling within that example occurs. This means that some members of a cohort may not be included each time.

Advantages of Cohort study are(Cohen et al, 2000):1. They permit researchers to examine individual variations in characteristics or traits, and to produce individual growth curves. This approach allowed the authors represent the data with the help of diagrams, where the results for each group were represented separately and could be compared to each other.2. Cohort analysis is especially useful in sociological research because it can show how changing properties of individuals fit together into changing properties of social systems as a whole.

This study observed various aspects of students' living basing upon social background of their living and their families, and the results make evident necessary changes that are to be carried out to improve bad conditions.3. Finally, time, always a limiting factor in experimental and interview settings, is generally more readily available in cohort studies, allowing the researcher greater opportunity to observe trends and to distinguish 'real' changes from chance occurrences (see Bailey, 1978) .

As the authors state, "this data allows us to both hone in on a particular time point for thorough analysis (e.g. the third year) as well as examine trends over time."Disadvantages of Cohort study are(Cohen et al, 2000):1. During the course of a long-term cohort study, subjects drop out, are lost or refuse further co-operation. Such attrition makes it unlikely that those who remain in the study are as representative of the population as the sample that was originally drawn. The authors admit that there could be important issues to reflect the notions of the students from disadvantage background, and these issues could have been missed in this study.

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