P4 & M3 - research

Secondary Research – This is the research where information is taken from external sources such as web pages, TV and books. This is highly beneficial to newspaper companies as it is quick to do and very cost effective. However, checking the reliability of the source may be an issue. Also, the information that they find may be outdated or inaccurate. For example, many people believe that Wikipedia is a reliable source, however anyone can edit their information pages. If the secondary research is done by looking through articles or newspapers then this could be an issue as they may provide some bias point of views. Social media is also a risky secondary research method as it will likely be bias and manipulated. 

Primary research – This is research carried out by yourself through methods like interviews, surveys or observation. This involves asking people to gain feedback or information on a matter to then use for yourself.
Research techniques:
Crowd sourcing – Gaining feedback from an audience, for example polls on social media

Interview – Typically a one-on-one meeting where questions are asked to gain some feedback or information

Survey- A set of questions sent out to a relevant audience to gain feedback or information

Web sources – This is information gathered from online websites. However, this can often be unreliable as some websites such as Wikipedia can be edited by the public.

Observation – this involves physically analysing a matter in its natural settings in hope to prove a hypothesis.

Use of social media – This involves collecting data from social media to gather opinions and statistics of certain audiences.

Primary research

For my article I am going to create a survey for students in Deyes High School to find out whether they participate in any sports clubs to keep students healthy. I will then include these results in my article. I am going to interview the head teacher of Deyes High Sixth Form to find out more about the schools problem with tired students and lack of participation. This essentially means the results will be reliable as the head teacher of the sixth form is likely to know lots about the school, therefore he is a reliable source. I will then take notes on what he has to say.

Questions for the head teacher of Deyes Sixth Form:

1.       How much of an issue is the decrease of students participating in PE lessons?

2.       What after school sports activities does the school provide and are there many students participating?

3.       How big of a problem is students selling sweets and energy drinks in school?

4.       What healthy food/drink does the sixth form canteen provide?

5.       Do you believe that allowing students to leave the premises at lunch is affecting their health?

6.       Are students not getting enough sleep to focus enough in the next school day?

7.       What do you think is increasing the laziness in students over the past decade?

8.       Do you believe phones and gaming is affecting student’s health and school work?

9.       What new healthy eating schemes or exercise motives do the school have in place?

10.   What do you think Deyes should introduce to encourage students to eat more healthily and exercise more frequently?

11.   On average, how many students try to skip PE lessons per class?

       Responses from head teacher:

Secondary research

The Government has overseen an alarming fall in the amount of PE in schools since coming to power

·         The biggest survey of its kind during the Coalition’s 4½ years in office found that the average number of minutes of PE offered to children in England had dropped well below two hours per week

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/schoolsports/11343801/Alarming-fall-in-school-PE-lessons-casts-doubt-over-governments-commitment-to-tackling-obesity-crisis.html


  Teens need about 8 to 10 hours of sleep each night to function best. Most teens do not get enough sleep — one study found that only 15% reported sleeping 8 1/2 hours on school nights.

·         Teens tend to have irregular sleep patterns across the week — they typically stay up late and sleep in late on the weekends, which can affect their biological clocks and hurt the quality of their sleep.

https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/teens-and-sleep

This source below helped me with some stragegies to keep awake and to get a good night sleep. I then used some of this advice within my article in order to help the audience with their sleeping if needed.

http://www.teachhub.com/strategies-dealing-sleepy-students

The article below backs up a point from my article which suggests that school should start later than it does. included in this source are some scientific facts to back this up which i will then include in my article

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/sleepy-teens-high-school-should-start-later-in-the-morning/

This research is beneficial to me as the amount of sleep students have can really damage their health and can often stop them from participating as much in school. This could be a big factor to the answer of my original question from my article, which is about student’s sleeping, health and participation in school.

Questionnaire justification

Questionnaire I have created an anonymous questionnaire that I will be using to find out some opinions from the students of Deyes High School. My article is about student’s sleeping patterns, health and sports participation at school so I had to ask relevant questions to gain as much feedback as possible. From my results, it turned out that the students don’t enjoy PE anymore. I asked 20 students and there was 12 that said they don’t enjoy the PE activities that Deyes offer. Also students have said that they aren't getting the scientifically recommended amount of sleep for their age group. This proves to me that my article is relevant and students can relate to it once it has been published. This is also very cost effective as printing out questionnaires isn’t expensive at all. It is also a very accessible option for me as I have access to Microsoft word to create the questionnaires and I have access to a printer to print them off.

The anonymous questionnaire is a good research source as from the 20 sets of results I can assume that these results will be similar across the school. This would allow me to include an average percentage of the students in the school for some of my points within the article. This would highly benefit me as I can generalise the results throughout the school without having to interview every student.

Interview Justification

This interview was very beneficial to me as I could gain very specific, reliable and accurate information from a teacher who has worked at the school for many years. His years of teaching experience allowed me to get some interesting opinions and reliable information from him.