To find out how many parents use physical violence and what kind of physical punishment they use and why. For this procedure I would use self reports. Questionnaires will be given out to every parent that’s outside a primary school and secondary school. I would give them out during morning and afternoon as different parents might pick up their children different times this would give me more data from different parent. Questionnaires will have some open questions and close questions to find out more details about punishment they’re giving their kid and what’s the reason for it.
Some of my closed questions will be ” Do you use physical punishment on your kids? ” and other open questions would be ” If you do use physical punishment , why? ” and ” what kind of physical punishment it is ? ” Parents can fill in the questionnaires by them self and also parents don’t have to put their names down, but kids name so we can have a data of which age group get physical punishment the most and also they will tick a box if they’re a male or a female , this will show us which gander tend to use more physical punishment.
If parents don’t have to put their name down and answer it privately this is advantage as they can be used to ensure coni¬dentiality, they can potentially cover embarrassing, socially undesirable or illegal topics. After I have asked 50 parents from secondary school and primary school, I would collect all my data and put them in a graph and both of data will be compared to each other and see what kind of physical punishment does parents use and what age group is more effected and on average we can see which kind of punishment is used more often and what gender uses it more often.
After a year I could re do the questionnaires and check the reliability of my resources. The strength of my self report is that parents don’t have to put their names down , this means they will feel more confident while answering knowing that nothing bad will happened if they answer it. Also this is a quick way to collect a data and easy way as well. The disadvantage of my self report is People may lie or skew their answers to make themselves look better. The person may not be able to give an accurate response due to cognitive biases, poor memory, etc.