Our research question for this section is: What factors influence enrolment in full time education?
In this section, we are researching what factors impact enrolment in full time education after secondary school. We may want to know more about the background of students who are enrolled in full time education after secondary school. Do students who score well on the GCSEs in Year 11 have more success in finding full time educational opportunities? Does a history of persistent truancy in Year 11 influence a young person's educational choices after secondary school? In order to do this research, we can use quantitative methods to analyse survey data from a publicly available dataset.
The dataset we’ll be using is the Youth Cohort Study 2004-2007 Cohort 12 dataset. You can find out how to locate, download, and access the CSEW from the UK Data Service website here. Before we can begin using this dataset to investigate the possible answers to the research question above, we need to identify our independent and dependent variables.
Choosing a dependent variable is an easy place to start in determining variables, as generally, once you have formulated a research question, you are aware of what you want your dependent variable to be. For instance, perhaps you are interested in studying what influences the number of ice cream cones sold at the beach. In this example, the number of ice cream cones would be your dependent variable. Your independent variables could be things like daily temperature, location on the beach, and time of year.
In our case, because we are interested in determining what factors might impact enrolment in full time education, our dependent variable throughout this section will be s2q10, a measure of whether or not a young person is enrolled in full time education after secondary school. Depending on the type of statistical analysis we run, we’ll be using different independent variables to illuminate various relationships. Some of these independent variables include the young person's sex, truancy history, and total GCSE scores in Year 11.
As you move through the pages in this section, you’ll learn how to perform various statistical analyses on the data in the YCS dataset. First, you’ll use univariate analysis to get some descriptive information about our dependent variable. Then, you can run bivariate analysis, introducing an independent variable into statistical tests to define its relationship with full time enrolment in education. Finally, you will practice multivariate analysis, which allows you to look at the influence of multiple independent variables on a dependent variable.