Evaluation of the Crash Course March 2009 - De Montfort University

Section 4: Findings from the survey data
4.1 Introduction
All institutions taking the Crash Course in the autumn term were invited to administer
the survey together with all those booking the course for the spring term. This
enabled comparisons to be made between those who had seen the presentation and
those who had not and between the responses of those who did receive the
presentation both before and after they saw it (see Section 2). A total of 1717 valid
questionnaires were received. Of those it was possible to match 290 individuals for
their completed questionnaires both before and after the course.
In this section, the demographic characteristics of the sample are provided first at 4.2
in respect of age, gender, and level of deprivation. At 4.3, the differences are
examined between young people who did not receive the course and those that did.
At 4.4, the scores before and after the course are discussed. Finally at 4.5 and 4.6,
the differences are examined between male and female respondents and between
the different levels of deprivation.
All inferential statistics tests assume a minimum alpha level of 0.05 (meaning we are
95% confident that the effects observed – for gender, course etc – cannot be
mistaken or attributed to chance). Thus any test returning a probability (p) value less
than 0.05 (the alpha level) is considered significant.
Because none of the data can be assumed to be normally distributed we used nonparametric
tests (which make very few assumptions of the data, and specifically do
not require data to be normally distributed). For comparisons of two groups we used
the Mann Whitney test and for more than two groups, the Kruskall Wallis test. For
before and after paired data we used Wilcoxon.
Some of the questions were not answered or spoiled to differing degrees. This
means that the total number of responses will differ for each question.
The views of the young people who saw the presentation are provided at the end of
the section at 4.7, together with the analysis of the free text qualitative responses at
4.8.
4.2 Demographics
The demographic characteristics of the young people responding to the survey are
set out below. The vast majority were aged 15 or 16 (probably in Year 11 or 12);
older respondents would have been in courses with colleges or training providers.
There was an even gender balance.
Respondents were asked to provide their gender and their date of birth, which was
coded for age as at October 2008 as set out below.
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