Introduction to research

There are two main branches of data, these are quantitative and qualitative data.

Continuing with the question ‘do young people that transition from primary school to secondary school have high levels of anxiety?’, we have decided to collect anxiety data to measure this.

But what exactly is anxiety data? How can we measure anxiety? The answer is there are numerous ways to measure anxiety. We might choose to use a questionnaire with rating scales that students can complete in class. The information gathered from these questionnaires would be quantitative data, because it consists of a quantity or amount – for instance the student scored a 4 on the anxiety scale, or 5 students answered ‘yes’ to whether they felt nervous about their transition to secondary school.

This gives us a great indication of the anxiety levels of the whole class, but also each student individually, relatively quickly. But there are other ways to measure anxiety that are also valuable.

For instance, if we wanted to know about the experience of the anxiety when transitioning to secondary school, we could ask students to fill out open-questioned questionnaire, or ask the questions verbally, like in an interview. This would be qualitative data, because it describes qualities or characteristics of what you are measuring.

The type of study we might carry out depends on the question we are trying to answer, and what we hope to do with the data.

‘Do young people that transition from primary school to secondary school have high levels of anxiety?’

If we hope to create an intervention to help students that are experiencing high levels of anxiety during the transition then we might want to develop a monitoring system, that enables you to ‘take the temperature of your class’ in terms of their wellbeing.

We’d have to think about the best way to get a true indication of the levels of anxiety in the students. One way to conduct research is by running an experiment. If you are able to change at least one thing, whilst controlling for all other variables, then this is an experiment. For example, you would be looking at pupils in different school years, whilst keeping other things that cause anxiety the same – like whether the student has exams that week.

There are two ways of running this experiment. We could compare the anxiety scores of the same students at three times: before they transition, during the transition (summer break), and after the transition. This is called repeated measures as the same students are tested more than once.

Alternatively, we could have three different groups of students: year 6s, year 6s on summer break, and year 7s. Because each group is separate from the other groups, we called this independent measures. The good news is that either way of running this experiment is valuable, the best way can be decided by you and your school, by considering what would be practically possible.

Repeated measures	Independent measures

As teachers, I’m sure that you will be thinking it will be difficult to achieve this level of control in a classroom setting, and that can be the tricky thing about experiments. The classroom is not a perfectly sterile environment, and many factors are at play here. Other things that could affect the anxiety levels of the students will be called nuisance variable. These may be relatively easy to keep the same, for example whether the students have a big test in the next lesson. But other things, such as how much sleep the student got the night before or what mood they are in, may be trickier to control.

There is no need to lose hope – there are other types of studies, conveniently named non-experimental methods. To get a more realistic view of anxiety you might observe students in different years. One example of how to do this is to have a checklist of predefined behaviours that might indicate anxiety. Although this won’t establish cause and effect (nail-biting could be due to a habit, rather than anxiety) it does give us more of an idea of how the students behave in a natural setting.

Other non-experimental methods that are popular in schools include surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. What better way to find out if students are anxious than to ask them!

Or so we think – as this can have other difficulties such as the student not feeling comfortable enough to be honest, worrying that they may be judged for their answers, or that there will be consequences for them – this is known as self-report bias, the student’s answers will be biased by how they are feeling at the time.

An intervention can be a treatment or relationship that an individual – the student for instance – is part of that encourages them to change their behaviour or emotions, particularly when they are experiencing a difficulty, such as anxious thoughts and feelings.

Typically research that involves an intervention will require the participant to take a measure of the behaviour of interest (such as anxiety or wellbeing) at the start – called a baseline measure. Then, after the intervention has taken place, the participant will complete the same measure again giving a post-intervention measure. The baseline and post-intervention measures will be compared to look for changes. This change can help us answer three key questions about the intervention: does it work? how well does it work? and why might it work?

There are lots of different types of interventions, but the two main categories to be aware of are:

Interventions are probably happening in your school all the time – for example strategies which teachers might try to improve scores in tests, such as buddying up with a higher achieving or older student. Research can help us formally evaluate and record just how useful different strategies are for your pupils, or highlight if something is doing more harm than good.

To keep things ethical, we must ensure that there is no detriment to anyone involved in the research.

We should make sure that the way the study is carried out protects children and young people, who may be more vulnerable to harm. If the research is not carried out in an ethical way, then there can be serious negative consequences, such as the withdrawal of the funding for the research, and dismissal of the project.

Youth mental health research is important. But it also touches on topics that some students may be sensitive about. It is always more important that if a child becomes upset during the research, or doesn’t want to take part, they are not made to carry on. They have the right to withdraw and any questions they might have completed already should be destroyed.

Another thing to consider is whether the participants fully understand the study they are taking part in, and agree to take part.

This is called informed consent. In our proposed anxiety study, we would have to ensure that all students understood what anxiety is. It would be best to let the students know the question that the research is answering, but if this would change the way they act in a way that might affect the results, then it is okay to indicate that the study is investigating an area, for example anxiety, and give the specific question after the data has been collected.

Imagine if we were carrying out this research with key stage 1 students. What changes would we have to make? It would be important to make sure we explained in a way that young children would understand. For example, we could explain anxiety in terms of worry, or use a short story to explain. Check out our section for ideas.

After the questionnaires have been gathered in, the interviews are over, or the observations are complete you will have a lot of data to be stored.

A common way of storing data is to allocate each student a number. Their data can be stored along with this number, on a spreadsheet. The list of names and numbers should be stored separately from the data, so that no one would be able to identify the student from the data spreadsheet. This is the basics of confidentiality.

Of course, confidentiality expands further than this, researchers and teachers should respect the privacy of students taking place in research, and should avoid discussing any answers that are given, or give out access to people who do not need to see the data.

As with anything a student tells you, if you have concerns about the safety of the student, you should follow your schools safeguarding procedures.