The "R-Word"

 

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People with disabilities have abilities too and that is what this course is all about - making sure those abilities blossom and shine so that all the dreams you have can come true.

Mary McAleese
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 Weaknesses
Our study contained some weaknesses and confounding variables. One of the biggest weaknesses of the study was the non-response bias. Of the 100 surveys sent to students we only received 74 back, and of the 11 surveys sent to teachers we only received 9 back. Some of the students selected for our survey were unable to receive the survey because of attending Polaris full time, taking classes online, or being in PSEOP. Also some of the students chosen for the survey were in special education classes and were not given the surveys as to not offend anyone. Some of the returned surveys were also void because the responder circled more than one answer or wrote in their own response. This partly resulted from a flaw in one of our questions. When we asked people if they used the r-word as a medical term, we neglected to provide options for people who didn’t use the word at all or who used the word as both a medical term and a non-medical term. Another one of our questions that may have created some ambiguity was the question that asked whether the responder personally knew someone with a disability. Because we did not provide any standards for having a personal relationship, this was left up to the responder to interpret. Some of the responders may have thought a personal relationship meant a casual acquaintance, while others may have believed it meant a close friend or family member with whom they interacted daily. Our study may have also contained a response bias. Some responders may have thought it would be funny to say they said the r-word everyday, while others may have been embarrassed about how often they actually said the r-word and thus put a lesser frequency. Also of all of the teachers who responded only one chose a choice other than never. This may have been because some of the teachers were embarrassed to answer truthfully or felt obliged to answer the way they did because of their professional status.

 Extrapolation
After observing that many people in our sample were unable to receive and respond to the survey, we feel that it would be better to narrow of population of interest from students and teachers at North Olmsted High School to North Olmsted High School students who attend classes at the school and are not in the special education program and North Olmsted High School teachers. This is because we can not accurately represent the entire NOHS population when the opinions of different groups of students were not accounted for. However, we would feel comfortable extrapolating our results to Northeast Ohio public high school students not in special education who attend traditional classes and Northeast Ohio public high school teachers. We would only feel comfortable extrapolating this far because location, school type, and age are extraneous factors that could change the outcome of our study.
 Suggestions

For further study we could broaden the study to include people’s reactions to hearing the r-word or saying the r-word in order to get a better understanding of its use. We could also block or stratify the study by grade level and gender to find any correlation between those factors and the use of the r-word. In order to eliminate the response bias, we could ask the responders about the use of the r-word by their peers. Responders may be more likely to answer truthfully about others than about themselves. Also in order to eliminate response bias and non-response bias the responder could take the survey in a room alone and then put the survey into a concealed envelope and someone would collect the survey as they left. The privacy could make the responder feel more comfortable answering truthfully. Also, collecting the survey would ensure that no one forgot to turn in the survey and yield a higher response rate.