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The increasing availability of official datasets : methods, opportunities and limitations for studies of education

Gorard, S.

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Abstract

The re-use of existing and official data has a very long and largely honourable history in education and social science. The principal change in the sixty years since the first issue of the British Journal of Educational Studies has been the increasing range, availability, and quality of existing numeric datasets. New and valuable fields of endeavour have formed around specific applications of these datasets, and some promising analytical techniques have been devised to deal with them. At the same time, the opportunities provided by these datasets have thrown up fascinating methodological and other challenges. This paper presents a brief summary of all of these developments, with illustrative examples. The paper then considers two fields of endeavour that have been particularly valuable in education studies – the political arithmetic tradition of origins and destinations, and the school effectiveness and improvement. Both have used similar datasets but for different purposes and so reaching rather different conclusions, with considerably different take-up by policy-makers. The paper ends by envisaging some of the ways in which these and other fields using secondary data may develop in the near future.

Citation

Gorard, S. (2012). The increasing availability of official datasets : methods, opportunities and limitations for studies of education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 60(1), 77-92. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2011.650946

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Feb 1, 2012
Deposit Date Apr 30, 2013
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal British Journal of Educational Studies
Print ISSN 0007-1005
Electronic ISSN 1467-8527
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 60
Issue 1
Pages 77-92
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2011.650946

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