Research Question
The fundamental interest of this statistical project was to determine the agenda of perceived mental safety and gender equity in the school setting. This is a quantitative study attempting to answer the question, “How many students from different grades and ages do or do not feel personal and gender safety in school?” Answering this question through the use of various statistical data processing tools is the sole purpose of this report.
Sample Formation
Fundamental to the work was the formation of a representative sample through which scaling to the entire school population could be done. However, in order not to complicate the questionnaire survey of students, it was necessary to create a sample size that was not too large. According to the Sample size formula (2020), the minimum allowed sample size for psychometric testing is thirty people, and that is the number that was used. Thus, the final sample consisted of 31 people, of whom 16 were women and 15 were men. In terms of age distribution, it is noticeable that Figure 1 is skewed to the right side: about 55% of all participants were aged 18-19 years, thus being high school students. The scatter plot is an excellent tool for demonstrating the underlying trend in the relationship of these variables (Koushik, 2020). The youngest age represented in the sample was 14 (no. = 2). The average age of the sample was 17.32 (SD = 1.70).
Survey Results
The school cross-sectional survey consisted of eight questions, of which six were central block questions. The questions in this portion asked the student to agree or disagree with the statement and thus represented a dichotomous scale. Table 1 shows the main trends for each question. An answer to each question was required, so none of the participants missed any of them.
Discussion
The Results section provided valuable data on the current school agenda among the sample analyzed. A side-by-side comparison with the national scale report from Skolinspektionen, if applicable, is used to discuss them critically. This approach will allow a deeper examination of the school environment and identify potential contradictions. The results of the test conducted showed that one-third of the participants felt safe inside the school – for a national survey, this number was 90% (Skolinspektionen, 2019). About two out of five students said they felt sufficiently calm during school, whereas for the national survey, this number was one and a half times higher. About half (48.4%) of the students surveyed said they were interested in schoolwork, which included any extracurricular activities and events.
Half of the students (51.6%) said they saw gender equality in school, but 61.3 (%) said they experienced discrimination. This could probably be due to unequal treatment by teachers or bullying by peers. Notably, as shown in Figure 2, on question #6, more affirmative responses (68.8%) were received from girls, while boys were more likely (66.7%) not to experience gender equality at school, as shown in the response distribution histogram (SC, 2021). This contrasts interestingly with information that girls tend to be more dissatisfied with school than boys (Skolinspektionen, 2019). Finally, only one in two out of five students said the school needed changes in the social agenda. The visualization of this is shown in a pie chart — Figure 3 — suitable for presenting binary data without a breakdown (Taylor, 2019). This is enough for school leadership to listen to students’ opinions.
Conclusion
Descriptive statistical results were obtained in this school survey. The sample collected was reasonably representative, as it included an almost equal proportion of boys and girls and people of different ages. It was shown that the majority of respondents were high school students. Among the key findings of this survey was that most high school students felt safe and about one in five felt calm. In terms of gender equality, about half of the students indicated that it was present in their school, but 1 in 5 said they had experienced episodes of gender discrimination. The findings answer the research question by providing a quantitative interpretation of the current agenda. Using this data can help school leaders make social and mental safety changes.
References
Koushik, C. S. (2020). Scatter plot — a tool for descriptive statistics. Medium. Web.
Sample size formula. (2020). Statistics Solutions. Web.
SC. (2021). 5.7 histogram. StatCan. Web.
Skolinspektionen. (2019). Resultat från Skolenkäten 2017-2018 [PDF document]. Web.
Taylor, C. (2019). What are pie charts and why are they useful? ThoughtCo. Web.