How the questionnaire was designed: Part of the planning required for the thesis was

the careful choice of questions. The questions asked were a mixture of open and closed questions. The advantages of closed questions was the ease of data analysis, thus making it less time consuming for the author, which was important as realistic time scales were essential. They are also easier for the respondents to answer when using a questionnaire,

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without an interviewer being present, and to assist further, a pre-coded response was provided. However, some open questions were asked to obtain a fuller answer, although the author was aware these could sometimes provide a problem in terms of responses being ambiguous and difficult to analyse. Other factors such as the order they were asked together with the importance of making the questionnaire visually appealing were considered. The instructions needed to be simple and as short as possible. Due to the age of the respondents involved, and the fact that it was a self-completion questionnaire, there was an awareness of the need for clarity in the questions, once again to avoid possible confusion and therefore invalidate answers. For this reason it was concluded after the test of the questionnaire that the author needed to be present at the schools when the young people filled out the form. This ensured they were comprehensively briefed so that all questions were understood and where necessary clarification was available from the author.

Finally there was also an awareness by the author that to ensure good validity the questions asked needed to ensure they were going to answer the main questions being asked by the thesis. The details of why questions were chosen will follow below but the flow of the questionnaire was to look at behaviour in the order of home, school and justice system, followed by an examination of involvement in perceived risky behaviours.

Due to his experiences as a police officer and after an initial review of the literature the author had an idea of the areas that needed to be enquired about, and that may have an influence on the behaviour of young people. Also although the author made the decision to make the questionnaire anonymous in order to achieve a more truthful answer from subjects he still needed some information about each candidate. Questions were asked about the gender of subjects as from his experience in both the criminal justice and education systems the author was aware that males appeared to misbehave more than females and wanted to test this. He was also aware than there was an over representation of non-white prisoners incarcerated in England and Wales compared to the general population and again wanted to therefore test in this area. From his police experience and initial literary review it was clear than family make-up may be statistically relevant, and so a question about the carers looking after the young people was considered necessary.

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In the initial test questionnaire there had been a question about understanding right and wrong but as ninety seven percent answered this question in the affirmative and the author was aware of the need not to ask too many questions it was assumed that this figure would remain constant and the question was dropped. Also dropped after the year seven questionnaire was a question about number of siblings and size of house. It had been initially asked as some educational professionals spoken to by the author, together with information obtained during the literary review suggested that overcrowding had an adverse effect on young people and their behaviour (Reynolds 2005, p8) However, there appeared to be little evidence of many young people living in over-crowded conditions in Fairfield after analysis of the year seven responses, together with a review of the first twenty one to one interviews. Only one of those first twenty young people interviewed stated that sharing a room with his brother caused him to misbehave and therefore again as the author was anxious not to ask too many questions this question was dropped from the year eight and nine questionnaires as the issue was not felt to be statistically relevant.

The next questions about young people’s leisure activities, together with those of their parents and friends were asked firstly as some evidence from the literature review suggested a positive effect on behaviour whilst some was less conclusive. Interestingly after a fuller examination of previous literature and research it would appear there is very little evidence linking leisure to positive effects on behaviour. Also one of the findings from the author’s previous research in Fairfield was that young people’s participation in leisure was linked to whether their parents were also involved in leisure activities and he wanted to establish if this was still the case.

The next question concerned what parents had tried to in order to positively influence young people’s behaviour and asked if it had worked. The options given as possible answers were chosen after talking to many young people about what types of discipline their parents used, together with giving them the option of ‘other’. However only a small number of subjects answered ‘other’ and the author is therefore satisfied that the options offered were correct. The next question concerned if parents discussed with the young people what would work to affect their behaviour. This was asked due to speaking to young people in the years leading up to the commencement of the research, where they appeared to be saying parents didn’t ask them, which helped contribute to the title of the research.

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The next questions concerned a similar process for discipline used by the schools to influence behaviour. Again the options given were as a result of speaking to young people, but also this time as well as speaking to teachers to establish what options were available to them, and again very few people answered ‘other’ and so the author is confident the options given to choose from were correct. The next question was again asked as young people stated they were rarely asked what would work, especially the pupils in the referral unit the author had spoken to over the previous years.

The next few questions were asked to establish the level of crime and ASB committed by the young people, but also whether they were caught as a result of committing this crime, as the authors experience as a Police Inspector talking to young people was that they were often not caught for their criminal activities. There is previous research on self-reported levels of youth crime, three examples of which are the MORI annual youth survey completed between 2001- 2005, the OCJS survey between 2003-2005 and the YLS survey between 1992-1998. The levels of self-reported youth crime was fairly static between 2001 and 2005 at between twenty five and twenty seven percent. Asking the question again here would both establish current levels of offending for comparative purposes, and if similar may provide a degree of affirmation about how representative the sample population was. The young people were also asked what was their reasoning if they had stopped offending as one of the main tenants of the thesis is the criminal justice system did not use the most effective interventions, and that question would help to confirm this.

The next three questions asked were about influences in young people’s lives as the initial literature review revealed previous research which stated that peers, parents and schools all had an influence on the behaviour of young people (Muncie 2004, p239) and (Smith 2007, p46). This confirmed the experiences of the author over the previous several years whilst dealing with youth crime.

The next six questions were about young people’s knowledge of various topics which again the literature review revealed were considered by some to be risky behaviours in terms of negatively influencing young people’s behaviour. Risky behaviours are those that potentially expose people to harm, or significant risk of harm which will prevent them reaching their

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potential. Some risky behaviour is normal and part of growing up. However, there is a ‘line’ which when crossed leads from normal/curious/experimental behaviour to behaviours that put children and young people or others at risk and could escalate the behaviour to a harmful stage. This “line” can be different according to societal norms. It should be acknowledged that although children and young people may not be actively participating in behaviour, observing or being exposed to the behaviour can have an impact on their own behaviour, as peer association can result in involvement (Blencowe 2011, p4). A question was asked about knowledge of pregnancy at the behest of the teenage pregnancy unit of the Local Authority, but was removed after the first year due to the low response rate compared to other questions. The other risk areas chosen were drugs, guns, knives, alcohol and gangs as the author’s experiences during his policing and charity work suggested that these were areas with a negative association to behaviour, together with reading prior to commencing the research.

After a review of the data obtained by questionnaire and analysis of the responses from the first year, and also after half of the one to one interviews were analysed some additional questions were added for the second and third years. These questions were also influenced by further reading completed during the first year of the project. As a result of this the author had cemented some of his views about what influenced people’s decision to commit crime and ASB, or behave badly at school or in the home. These additional questions concerned parental or sibling imprisonment, and poverty as indicated by workless parents or the requirement to accept free school meals. The other additional questions concerned obtaining more details about the perceived risky behaviours in terms of what drugs or weapons had been used and how often in the last year. The author added these questions as he became more aware of the need to obtain more detailed information to ensure validity of the research.

As well as wanting to ensure the correct questions were asked to obtain the answers being sought, the author was aware of a few more guidelines to ensure the best data was obtained. The questions asked were a mixture of open and closed questions. The advantage of closed questions was the ease of data analysis, thus making it less time consuming for the author. This was important due to other demands on the author, so realistic time scales were essential. They are also easier for the respondents to answer when using a questionnaire, without an interviewer being present, and to assist further, a pre-coded response was provided. However, some open questions were asked to obtain a fuller answer, although the

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author was aware these could sometimes provide a problem in terms of responses being ambiguous and difficult to analyse. Due to the age of the respondents involved, and the fact that it was a self-completion questionnaire, there was an awareness of the need for clarity in the questions and language used, once again to avoid possible confusion and therefore invalidate answers. For this reason the author concluded after the test of the questionnaire that he needed to be present at the schools when the young people filled out the form. This ensured they were comprehensively briefed so that all questions were understood and that there was a consistency about what certain terms meant, such as ASB.

The above subsection describes how the questionnaire was designed. One of the crucial features to ensure a well-designed questionnaire is to pilot or test the document and the section below will describe how this was done.