Research Instruments

I employed two research instruments to collect the data for this study.

Survey

In my review of the literature on high school athletics, parent involvement and self-efficacy, I found no complete instruments that would meet the research

requirements of this study. However, rather than create an entirely new survey, I based much of my data collection on a portion of the Marsh Self Description Questionnaire (Marsh, 1986; Marsh, 1987). The seven part survey was designed to answer the two main research question and its 4 sub-questions and consisted of seven parts.

Part 1

Questions 1 - 13 gathered demographic information from the respondents. This demographic information included age, grade and gender of the respondents and assisted in helping affirm socio-economic status as well. This portion of the survey paralleled (with permission) a survey used by the Educational Psychology Lab at the University of British Columbia in their study of Internet Bullying (2010).

Part 2

Questions 16 – 25 asked respondents about their participation in high school athletics. Along with determining the grade level of student athlete, this section also determined how much participation there was, at what level, and in what specific sporting disciplines. These questions were used to determine:

1. The length of time the student athlete had been involved in high school athletics. 2. The sports in which the student athlete was involved.

3. How long they had been involved athletics overall – including community athletics. 4. Students’ self-assessment of their athletic ability.

These themes were derived from similar studies mentioned in the literature review that discussed student participation in high school athletics (Bartko & Eccles 2003; Broh, 2002; Goldberg & Chandler, 1989; Trudeau & Shepard, 2008).

Part 3

For Question 26, I inserted a portion the Marsh Self Description Questionnaire (1986), which consisted of 54 sub-questions. This section employed a Likert scale and asked questions gauging feelings of self-worth, relationships with others, and

respondents’ perceptions of how they were viewed by their peers.

Part 4 - 6 covered Questions 27 – 39, which were derived from studies

mentioned in the literature review that discussed themes of parent involvement in school and athletics (Eccles, 1994; Kanters, 2002; Turner & Lapan, 2002; Waldron & Krane, 2005; Young, 1994). The questions were designed to help determine the answers to the four research sub-questions.

Part 4

Questions 27 – 29 concerned the students’ perceptions of their parents’ involvement in the school. This portion of the survey focused on overall involvement, and not exclusively athletic involvement.

Part 5

Question 29 and 30 were used to gauge student perceptions of their parents’ involvement in their school-based athletic experiences.

Part 6

Questions 31 – 39 were related to students’ perception of their academic success and their perceptions of whether their parents and athletics affected this variable.

Questionnaire and Focus Group

A ten-item questionnaire (Appendix D) was created to serve as the basis for the focus group protocol. The questionnaire consisted of short response items designed to gauge respondent perceptions of their own involvement in high school athletics, their feeling of self-efficacy and academic success, and how these related to their perception of parental involvement. Respondents initially wrote out responses to each item on the questionnaire and then gathered to discuss their responses in a focus group of 10 students. This gave respondents an opportunity to both answer questions in an open- ended format and build on their own understanding through engagement in discussion with their peers (Gall, Gall, & Borg, 2007). This was a semi-structured process. Questions 1 - 13 asked for demographic information, and to maintain consistency, this was the same as what was used in the survey. The remaining questions asked the student athletes to respond to questions pertaining to their involvement in high school athletics, their feeling of self-worth, their relationships with their parents, their

relationships with other students and their perceptions of their own level of their academic success (see Appendix D for the full protocol).

Having the questionnaire’s data collected in two ways was important in building a complete understanding of the students’ experience and beliefs. In answering the questions on their own first, students were able to respond without bias from any of the others in the group and without the researcher asking follow up questions – it was purely their answer. They gathered in a focus group to discuss their responses in greater depth, allowing them to “play off” each other’s answers and clarify their own responses. This process also allowed the researcher to ask clarifying questions.

In this form of mixed method study, a deductive approach to evaluating the qualitative data was used. This type of approach, in conjunction with the analysis measures mentioned in the previous section, allowed me to interrogate predictions generated from the literature reviews. The hypothetic-deductive method(Gall, Gall, & Borg, 2007) enabled predictions to be made and, by evaluating the data from the surveys, measure the success of such predications against the data.

1. First the written comments from each questionnaire were typed into a table for each respective school. The data was entered for each participant.

2. The researcher listened to the recording of the focus group to determine whether there were any additional data derived from follow up questions and the interview.

3. This data was added into the table for each school.

4. A comparison table between the two schools was created.

Research Tools Pilot Tests

Because I was working largely from established surveys and studies (as previously described in the Research Instruments section), I did not put this survey through formal validation. I did, however, have both the survey and questionnaire and focus group protocols reviewed and pilot tested by experts in the field, and modifications were made based on their suggestions. The survey was examined by the two athletic directors in the participating schools, two school administrators, one researcher from the University of British Columbia (Educational Psychology Lab on Internet Bullying), one researcher from the Masters of Counselling Program at Trinity Western University, and my doctoral committee. I asked reviewers to provide general comments as well as specific feedback on clarity and match with research questions. Based on the results of the survey review, I clarified and simplified some of the questions to make it easier for respondents to understand. I also modified my Likert scale in questions 27-39,

eliminating the neutral response and shifting to a forced choice scale.

The questionnaire for the focus groups was also examined by the same group of individuals. However, because this questionnaire was intended to elicit both written and oral responses from students, I also asked the five students of the Skyview Student Athletic Council (none of whom participated in the study) to test it. These students consisted of two female grade 10 students, one male grade 11 student, and one female grade 12 student. Based on their feedback, I changed some of the questions on the written response section (not the demographic section) to increase clarity.