Data Collection and Research on Students from the United Kingdom, How to Conduct the Research

“For an accurate estimate of the relationship between variables, a descriptive study usually needs a sample of hundreds or even thousands of subjects” (The Association for Educational Communications and Technology). The estimate of the relationship is less likely to be biased if you have a high participation rate in a sample selected randomly from a population.

* With a small sample the results may not be representative of the whole population.

In my study, I will gather a randomized focus group to represent the Hispanic youth population across three high school graduating classes and three college campuses entering groups of students. Since my population is Hispanic immigrant youth, my sample group will be collected in three high schools and three colleges in Hispanic neighborhoods or with a relative large population of Hispanic or Latino students. A group of 15 randomized students will be gathered from each school, to get a total of 45 high school graduating students and 45 college entering students. Making my total sample size of 90 Hispanic students.

The study was done with 100 participants, fifty men and fifty women averaging 23 years old. All participants were students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who received course credit due to their participation. To me this kind of sampling is a convenience sample as the students received credit for participating in the study; it also is a small sample that doesn’t reflect the whole population. The authors mentioned that they

There are variety of sampling techniques that can be used, but the purpose of sampling is that the researcher requires the findings obtained from a study to be true of the population in which it was drawn from (Eysenck, 2006). So that the sample of behaviour will be accurate when generalising results to the rest of the target population. In order to do this researchers must ensure that they use a representative sample not a biased sample. The benefit of stratified sampling is that subgroups are created within a population meaning it is more likely to be a representative sample when generalising

In this study, the control variables are the gender of the student and the school that they attend. Throughout the study, students are compared on these two variables to understand whether there were differences based on these.

To facilitate the study and develop a proper solution to the problem, the research will sample 100 individuals from different sectors within the society. The students from different departments

In order to get a sample of 100 students, I will take a stratified sample of each year group, and then of each gender within the year groups. I will use stratified sampling because using this I can get a fair sample that is proportional and to the ratio of the original number of students within each year group out of the whole school.

To collect a large sample I used volunteer sampling from within Newcastle Sixth Form College. Participant forms were handed out to every tutorial class (equivalent to registration) within the college to make sure that every student is presented with the opportunity to take part in the study. This allowed me to have a population of over 500 students to sample from. Once the volunteers had submitted their interest, I planned to then try to make the sample more representative of the national population. However, this was unfortunately not possible for two reasons. The first is that the sample would consist almost entirely of students aged between 15 and 20. Secondly, the final sample size was too small to try and make it

Task 1 Part A: Write a reflective account of about 1,000 words on the following: (word count: 969)

This essay critically analyses the utilization of different research approaches when answering a clinical question. The assigned clinical issue discussed in this essay is the mandated nurse-to-patient ratios in Queensland hospitals will improve patient outcomes.

Research, as defined by Merriam Webster, is “the activity of getting information about a subject” (Research, n.d.). When looking at the research process there are two main approaches for gathering information; qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative approach focuses on describing information in a deep thought provoking manner. Adversely, the quantitative approach focuses on information from a larger number of people and applies statistical techniques to recognize patterns in the data (“Organizing,” n.d.). In the educational setting, principals are the leaders of the school. Principals need to develop teachers, create a safe and productive work environment, and try to impact student achievement. Great principals search for new and inventive ways to make their school thrive. Research provides principals opportunities to better understand problems and changes in the school setting. Using research-based data, principals can help promote student and teacher success in the educational setting.

This investigation which I carried out is closely related to statistics, where its main objective is to help us understand how a large amount of data is analysed and tabulated with the help of sampling and estimation, as well as its application in real life. In this investigation, we were instructed to analyse the census data tabulated from the respondents, where they input the data through a survey form available online. The respondents consist of students who are taking South Australian Matriculation course at Taylor’s College Subang Jaya. We were to carry out a series of analysis regarding the variables derived from the census data, and interpret the results obtained with the application of statistics knowledge.

A sample is a set of data drawn from the population, it is considered as a subset. Populations are defined as the set of all items or individuals of interest. Samples are less time consuming than a census, less costly to administer than a census and it is possible to obtain statistical results of a sufficiently high precision based on samples. There are two types of sampling techniques, probability and non-probability sampling.

The researchers gave information about the teachers who were used in the study but did not mention anything about the students who were present in the classes. From the primary schools, it can be seen that there were 22 female teachers and 10 male teachers, whilst from secondary schools, there were 17 female teachers and 21 male teachers. Though they have given these details, how the participants were recruited was not listed. This is a fundamental flaw as it would have given more information as to why the sample was so small. In addition, it then does not notify the readers whether there was a random allocation. Had teachers been randomly allocated to classes, it could be assumed that there would have been biasing the