Researching sensitive issues in education in the Limpopo Province of South Africa

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Researchers in Social Sciences have generally encountered problems in ensuring dataquality when dealing with topics that are regarded as sensitive. This thesis reports onan investigation into the methodology used for research projects around sensitiveissues in education in the Limpopo Province of South Africa.Data consists of twelve interviews with individual principals (each interview schedulecontaining semi-structured question items from ten categories) and a thirty-three itemself-report questionnaire survey administered to one hundred and fifty principalsdrawn from two hundred and seventy two secondary schools over the course of anacademic year (2002) and conducted in the Limpopo Province of South Africa ..Results reveal nine major categories of sensitive issues in school management onwhich principals have difficulty in providing information to researchers: schoolpolicy, school financial issues, moral or social relations issues, learner and educatordisciplinary issues, working conditions, absenteeism, developmental appraisal,educator unions, and religious matters policy issues. Principals have also reported onthe various reasons why they regard each of the aspects as sensitive, thereby making itdifficult for them to provide information around. Of these, moral issues wereconsidered the most sensitive. The major reasons given were: confidentiality,intrusion of privacy, fear oflegal sanction, threat to work and violation of the rights ofthe individual.Analysis of the different sensitive issues also show that certain biographicalcharacteristics - age of the principal and years of experience as principal - aresignificant mediators in principals' perceptions of sensitive issues in schoolmanagement. That is to say, these contribute to principals' assessment of theiremotional, physical and psychological well-being.Sensitivity is a problem when collecting data for research purposes. It warrants theattention of all those involved in social science research. The findings in this studypoint to the issues in school management that are highly sensitive to provideinformation suggesting that data collected would therefore not be of a high quality.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University