Investigating the extent of parental choice in education

Supporters of marketization policies claim that an education market gives parents greater choice over which school their children can
attend. Sociologists are interested in investigating how much parental choice there actually is in this education market. Some parents are
much more aware than others of how to ‘work the system’, even to the extent of manipulating the rules in their favour.

Sociologists may use structured interviews to investigate the extent of parental choice in education. However, although structured
interviews are useful for gathering factual information, they are probably less effective when it comes to finding out parents’ attitudes
and feelings. Also, how far parents are likely to give honest answers to the questions put to them in a structured interview may depend
on whether they feel their role as a parent is being challenged by the questions asked.

“Applying material from Item A and your knowledge, evaluate the strengths and limitations of structured
interviews for the study of the extent of parental choice in education” (20 marks)

Plan

Who: Parents

What: parental choice in education

How: Structured interviews

Intro: positivists prefer structured interviews, makes the data more reliable and representative, can be done on
a wide range of parents, quickly and more easily/cheaply

P1: Practical  straightforward, no training, large no. of parents  may be difficult to get into school, hierarchy

P2: Ethical  may be stressful/sensitive topic

P3:  Validity more in-depth than a questionnaire  parents likely to lie, untypical, impression management,
worried that their ideas may be leaked.

P4: Representative –  easy to carry out on large group  may not be representative of other
classes/ethnicities/location/different schools?

Evidence: Young & Willmott Young and Willmott who approached 987 people in their sample and only 54 refused to be
interviewed, showing that people may find it harder to turn down a face-to-face request. This could show that parents may
be more willing to take part if using a structured interview rather than a questionnaire for example.

Intro: Positivists like using structured interviews because they produce qualitative data. They enable
interviews to be conducted quicker and can therefore gain responses from a larger sample making
the data more generalisable.

Parents are usually quite willing and helpful and may feel more obliged to attend an interview rather
than a questionnaire. Structured interviews would enable the researcher to devise a standardised
set of questions in relation to parental choice in education which can be given out in the same order
to a relatively large sample. They also don’t require any specialist training, meaning the sample
frame could include a wide range of parents, gaining a more representative idea of parental
attitudes. However, parents are difficult to contact due to time constraints and may only want to
attend if they see some benefit to their child’s education. Furthermore, it may be difficult to get
parents into school to discuss parental choice in education, they may be less likely to want to attend
school due to the sensitive nature of the topic.
An advantage of using structured interviews with adults, especially parents is that they provide more
in-depth data than a questionnaire so the researcher can gain further insight into parental attitudes,
the parents can also ask to clarify certain questions if they don’t understand the wording or possibly
educational jargon which may be used in the interview when discussing marketization of education,
for example. However, a huge weakness of a structured interview in this case, is that parents may be
reluctant to be open about how they chose which school to send their children to. As stated in Item
B, parents ‘are probably less effective when it comes to finding out parents’ attitudes and feelings’
parents often do ‘play the system’ and would be reluctant to discuss this, due to fear of the
information being leaked or stigma if they did do certain things to enable their child to get into a
certain school. Also the setting of the interview taking place in school can pose its own problems, for
example parents may feel threatened due to the hierarchical nature of school, and therefore not
give honest answers, questioning the validity of the data obtained. The topic may also cause parents
embarrassment or they may feel pressured in a school environment posing ethical problems.

Another advantage of structured interviews is the ease of replication, due to the same questions on
parental choice in education being provided in the same order, each parent will receive the same
experience of the interview. Although it is not as easy as distributing a postal questionnaire, it would
be possible to carry out the interview in a range of different schools and geographical areas to assess
the extent to how parents choose schools and whether there are differences in different areas, types
of schools or even social classes. However, a problem with structured interviews is that you are likely
to get an untypical type of parent willing to take part, posing problems for creating a valid picture of
parental choice in education. In this case you are likely to get parents who haven’t ‘played the
system’ and parents who are happy to come into school, some working class parents for example,
may feel threatened by school and won’t want to take part, therefore the research may be
unrepresentative. You also may have problems interviewing parents from certain ethnic groups, as
language barriers may cause problems, a questionnaire in this case may be better as it can be
translated.

Research to show the strengths of using questionnaires compared to other methods by Young and
Willmott shows that interviews can have a high response rate, compared to questionnaires. They
approached 987 people in their sample and only 54 refused to be interviewed, showing that people
may find it harder to turn down a face-to-face request. This could show that parents may be more
willing to take part if using a structured interview rather than a questionnaire for example .

To conclude, structured interviews are effective in terms of gaining a more valid insight into parental
choice in education and are much quicker than conducting an unstructured interview. However, a
range of methods would be advantageous for example, using a questionnaire to gain primary
information into parental choice in education, but then possibly following this up with an
unstructured or group interview. Secondary statistics could also be used to compare differences
between different catchment areas and schools.