Elogio de la pobreza

Leyser and Kirk (2004) examined parental views and factors influencing their perspectives about inclusion. The study was conducted in a Midwestern state in the USA. Four hundred and thirty seven parents with children with mild to severe disabilities responded to a “Parent Opinion About Inclusion or Mainstreaming” questionnaire. The respondents were 343 mothers, 34 fathers, 60 couples and other family members.

A five point Likert scale questionnaire made up of three parts was used to collect data. The first part elicited information on the background of the respondents. The second included an “Attitude towards inclusion/mainstreaming scale” and was composed of 18 items selected and adapted for parent respondents from the revised “Opinions Relative to Mainstreaming Scale” (ORM) by Antonak and Larrivee (1995) and an earlier version of the scale by Larrivee and Cook (1979). Of the 18 items, eight items were in favour of inclusion and ten expressed negative attitudes about inclusion. The scores of the negative items were reverse coded during the analysis so that the low rating could be interpreted as favourable to inclusion.

The third part of the instrument include items requiring parents to rate their feelings about placement of children with SEN, satisfaction with services, and teachers available time. Space was provided for parents comments. Frequencies, means, ANOVAs and t-tests were used to analyse the data. Even though the study yielded information about parental views and factors influencing their perspectives about inclusion, fathers were under-represented. The sampling procedure used was not described thereby affecting ability to replicate the study.

Kalyva et al. (2007) explored the attitudes of Greek parents of primary school children without SEN towards inclusion using a quantitative approach. The sample comprised 338 parents selected from three randomly selected primary schools in Thessaloniki. This was made up of 182 fathers and 156 mothers aged between 27- 58 years. The parents were asked to respond to ‘‘My Thinking About Inclusion Scale’’ (MTAI) developed by Stoiber et al. (1998). This consisted of 12 Likert scale items.

There were six reverse questions. A pilot study was conducted with 40 parents to ensure that the data from these parents were well understood. Kalyva et al. (2007)

reported that the parents were asked to complete another questionnaire devised by Besevegis et al. (1997).

In all, 400 questionnaires were distributed to the parents via the children and parents were asked to return them to the teachers. The return rate was 84.5%. Chi- square, MANCOVA, means and SDs were used for the analysis.

Whereas the study was based on self-report and there was no information on the actual behaviour of the parents, observation of the actual reaction of the parents would have yielded more information. It must be noted that self-report is used by most surveys and the researchers take it on trust that the respondents will report on what they actually feel or think; they accept whatever their research participants tell them. Additionally, qualitative interviews could have been used to shed more light on the information given through self-reports.

Chavkin and Williams (1993) conducted a study to investigate the attitudes and practices of minority parents regarding their involvement in their children’s education. The investigation was done in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The study included 3,103 parents and 4,073 educators. A Parent Involvement Questionnaire (PIQ) was used to collect the data. This is a self-reported Likert scale instrument consisting of 101 closed response items.

The instruments were distributed at open house meetings sponsored by PTAs across the six regions. Translators were provided for parents who could not speak English. This gave such parents the opportunity to be part of the study. But what the researcher failed to tell us is whether all the people who spoke English could actually read, understand and complete the questionnaire or whether it had to be interpreted to them.

Frequencies, rank orders, means and SDs were used to present the data. The breakdown procedure was used to help interpret the comparisons among the ethnic groups. Accordingly, the eta-squared statistic with a significance level of p ≤ .001 was used to estimate the amount of variance that could be accounted for by the difference in ethnicity.

The study was able to yield some interesting and useful findings. However, the researchers did not explicitly describe the type of sampling method they used. Also, in investigating reasons for less PI, the researchers could have introduced a qualitative element into the research such that the respondents would compose

their own reasons as to why they involved themselves less in their children’s education. This will have introduced depth and meaning to the study.

Again, the questionnaires they used had too many items (101). When questionnaires are too long there is a tendency for fatigue to set in and the respondents may just be responding without reading critically; this will affect the findings.

An examination of the three studies described in this section shows that they all used Likert scale items in their questionnaire. It is evident that Likert scale items are able to yield useful data for this type of research.

The study conducted by Kalyva et al. (2007) yielded a high (84.5%) questionnaire return rate. This significant return rate may be because the children who disseminated the questionnaires impressed upon their parents to respond to the questionnaire. The implication of this for my study is that I must adopt a questionnaire dissemination strategy that will result in a high return rate, such as, having personal contact with the respondents and following up to ensure the questionnaire is returned, as the return rate can have an impact on my findings. Having personal contact may lead to more time used for data collection and also increase travel expenses.

Another observation made is that all the studies either used or adopted questionnaires from previous studies conducted by other researchers. This is something worth doing as the reliability and validity of these instruments has already been established.