Literature research Essay

I found a lot of valuable information from doing my literature research. I was able to see that many people have different answers on how to combat bullying. I also found out very interesting stats on bullying over the past 3 years. They showed me that each year there was an increasing amount of children calling child line about bullying issues compared to the previous years. This is statistical evidence to support my hypothesis, â€Å"bullying is spiralling out of control†. If I had been able to conduct my interview my results would have been much more valid. Valid data is a true picture of what is being measured. From the interview that I did conduct I was able to look at the views of a head teacher who had been in education for many years so was able to see if bullying really was getting worse. She believes that bullying hasn’t got any worse it is just society now has a greater awareness of it. She also says as there is now much more media coverage that gives young people ideas to do different things to people to get attention. This would refute my hypothesis but as this is of only one persons view it is not as valid as I would like. When conducting my questionnaires I had 10 participants for the adult questionnaire and 10 participants for the children’s questionnaire. This was fairly small scale therefore making it lass valid. If I had a longer period of time I would be able to get much more respondents and get them from a wider area making my results more valid and more reliable My results from the adults questionnaire showed me that all the respondents believe that bullying isn’t spiralling out of control its just society has a greater awareness of it. 70% of my respondents were also aware of bullying when they were at school. My questionnaires that I received from the children showed me that they have a lot of knowledge on the subject. All of the children said that bullying had been around for a long time and 0ver half of them thought that it was getting worse. This could be due to the fact that as the get older they are starting to experience more bullying situations and see this as it is due to the fact that bullying is getting worse. In conclusion my results both support my hypothesis ( bullying is spiralling out of control) and refute it. I found supporting evidence for both of these so I cant say which one I believe is true. My questionnaires and interview are supporting evidence for my hypothesis but the literature research shows me strong evidence to refute it especially the statistical evidence I found. Therefore I cant conclude from my research that bullying is spiralling out of control but it is a strong possibility that society is now more aware of it which may make bullying look like it is spiralling out of control with all the recent media attention there has been. If I repeated my research project to make it more valid and reliable I would do a longitudinal survey. With these I would be able to analyse the changes of bullying and make comparisons over time making the results I already have more reliable as I would be able to back them up with these repeated results. I would be able to gain a lot of quantitative data which would enable me to produce more reliable stats and help me to analyse statistical data over a longer period of time. I could also use supervised questionnaires as I would then know that the person that I wanted to fill in the questionnaire actually did making them more valid. A way of getting more respondents to fill my questionnaire within the short space of time that I would have would be to use postal questionnaires. I could cheaply reach a large amount of people making my results more valid. The problem with these is that they have a low response rate (less than 50%). I could also look at bullying from a different angle, to gain a better understanding of it. I could look more at the types of bullying that happen and the different effects it has on the victims. This could give me a deeper insight into the different aspects of bullying and could possibly show me ways in which bullying could be stopped. Bibliography   http://news.bbc.co.uk