Research Question 3: GCSE scores

Our research question for the whole of this section is: What influences the total GCSE scores of young people in the final year of secondary school?

We’ll be using the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales 2004-2007 (or YCS) dataset to try to answer this question, because this dataset includes detailed information on the lives and goals of young people over a four year period as they make their way out of secondary school. The data could help us identify relationships between early and later choices and accomplishments. The information from each year's survey is clearly labeled for us in the dataset, which will let us compare educational achievements across years.

We'll begin our quantitative analyses by running some initial univariate analysis.

Univariate analysis refers to the quantitative data exploration we do at the beginning of any analysis. These analyses provide us with descriptions of single variables we are interested in using in more advanced tests and help us narrow down exactly what types of bivariate and multivariate analyses we should carry out.

We should always start our univariate analysis by operationalizing our research question. This is done by determining which variables most suit our question of educational achievement, and how best to use them.

Before we begin using quantitative methods, we’ll need to decide what we want our dependent variable to be. Because we are interested in GCSE scores in the last year of secondary school, we should select a variable that codifies educational achievement in some way. There are several variables in the YCS dataset that measure educational or employment outcomes in all four sweeps of the survey. For our purposes in this section, we’ll choose s1gcseptsnew, which concerns the total GCSE score earned by each young person surveyed in Year 11. To locate this variable, open the SN 5830 Cohort Study of England and Wales zip file, access the SPSS folder, and double-click on the c12S1234final.sav file. SPSS should open automatically. In the Variable View window, you can see that s1gcseptsnew is variable #243.

This is the dependent variable we will be using for the entirety of the Research Question 3 section. Now we can start our univariate analysis.