https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/...used-to-go-to-school-at-least-once-last-year/ (paywalled)
This article was top of my irish times feed this morning, based on a new report from charity Barnardos Headline:
Reading further into the article...
First of all, it was an online self-reported survey. As any psychology student will know, such studies are unreliable.
Second, there were a relatively small number of responses, see quote below.
That's pretty small when there are almost a million children in education. Per Wikipedia, there are approximately 950,000 children enrolled in primary and secondary schools across the Republic of Ireland. Many parents will have more than one children, so let's say there were around 1 in a 1000 responses relative to the number of children in school. Now it is true that a sample of 1000 can be statistically signifiant, but ONLY WHEN the sample is truly representative of the whole population. See point one!
But finally and significantly, we discover that the majority of respondents actually said their children never or very rarely refuse to go to school. For primary school children, these totals were 78% and for secondary 67%:
In other words, the headline could equally have been "Most primary and secondary students happily go to school almost every day". This wouldn't have made the top of my feed, I expect.
Now I don't want to take the focus off the general thrust of the report. I have experience of a child refusing to go to school with chronic anxiety. I just don't think that it's helped by misleading headlines in the media and suspect study data.
This article was top of my irish times feed this morning, based on a new report from charity Barnardos Headline:
Reading further into the article...
First of all, it was an online self-reported survey. As any psychology student will know, such studies are unreliable.
Second, there were a relatively small number of responses, see quote below.
That's pretty small when there are almost a million children in education. Per Wikipedia, there are approximately 950,000 children enrolled in primary and secondary schools across the Republic of Ireland. Many parents will have more than one children, so let's say there were around 1 in a 1000 responses relative to the number of children in school. Now it is true that a sample of 1000 can be statistically signifiant, but ONLY WHEN the sample is truly representative of the whole population. See point one!
But finally and significantly, we discover that the majority of respondents actually said their children never or very rarely refuse to go to school. For primary school children, these totals were 78% and for secondary 67%:
In other words, the headline could equally have been "Most primary and secondary students happily go to school almost every day". This wouldn't have made the top of my feed, I expect.
Now I don't want to take the focus off the general thrust of the report. I have experience of a child refusing to go to school with chronic anxiety. I just don't think that it's helped by misleading headlines in the media and suspect study data.