Derrington 2012 thesis.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

5.4.1 Choice of questionnaires
The decision over which questionnaires to use had to be led by the school context and
the students who would be questioned. Time was the main factor because it was
anticipated that students would not be able to cope with too many questions.
At the time when the project was being set up, students at The Centre School were
accustomed to completing W3 Insight assessment tools (W3 Insights Ltd, 2002).
They are short, online tests which ask students how they feel about school and
learning and are an effective way to obtain data: they are quick to administer, which
is good for students who generally struggle to stay on tasks for more than a few
minutes, and offer a snapshot for the school to monitor student’s feelings. However,
there were several reasons why they were not suitable to use for this project: it would
have been difficult to administer the tests consistently and the results could only be
obtained as combined data for the school. As the data could not be student specific,
gathering particular results to determine differences between the students receiving
and not receiving music therapy would have been impossible and therefore pointless
for this design.
Other available questionnaires were considered, including one that measured social
functioning and mental health, known as CORE: Clinical Outcomes in Routine
Evaluation (Evans et al., 2000). These questionnaires are short and based on a
person’s feelings over a past week. The questions are simple and consist of ten
statements. The short length is designed to minimise demands on young people and to
ease scoring in busy settings, however, this means that the data would have been too
limiting for use in this research project.
Like the CORE questionnaires, the Beck Inventories for Youth are easy to administer
but they are longer and more thorough. They are straightforward, relevant, written
with young people in mind and comprehensively cover the areas of emotional and
social impairment. These were the areas being investigated in this research and were
therefore ideal for the study.
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