Investigating the Causes and Factors of High School Absenteeism: A Cross-Sectional Study

Research Questions and Hypotheses

Identify The Research Question(s) And The Hypotheses

Identify The Quantitative Research Design And The Statistical Analysis Used

Identify The Instrument(s) Used In The Study

Describe The Population And Note The Specific Number Of Participants 

Summarize The Findings Of The Research Study

As per the name of title of the research, the main concept of the research work is to investigate about the contributing factors that leads to absenteeism in high schools. Absenteeism in school refers to the situation where a student pertains the habit of staying away from school with or without any genuine reason. Hence, this research searches the answer of the question that is why the high school students want to miss classes.

The research involves a cross-sectional design. For the research instruments the research includes demographic information sheet and School Assessment Survey in the revised Turkish version. Total 423 students from the high school studying in 9-12 grades were included as the participants of the research work. All the students were taken from same ethnic background with different socio-economic status. The mode of survey was paper-pencil survey. All the participants finished the survey activity within 25 minutes.

According to the findings of the research, there are various factors that impacts on the notion of high school absenteeism. The found factors are namely personal factors, family factors, and academic achievements. The study noticed that students pertaining reverse academic self-perception, adverse interest towards the faculties and entire school, deficiency in motivation are prone to have the feature of absenteeism.  

This research paper considers the concept of absenteeism as a significant problem for social and public health. Hence, the research searches the answer of the research question whether the children and adolescents prone to absenteeism possess fear from any particular lesson or any activity that is a part of the school day. Secondly, the research aims to investigate one-week school absenteeism in Germany. Thirdly, to investigate about the existence of previously known risk factor that contributed to the school absenteeism. A non-probability design of research was selected for this particular research work.

Following the non-probability design, the research used the instrument of online survey method. The link of the online survey (www.limesurvey.org) was sent to 10 students and adolescents. After conducting the survey they published the result through channel. The finding section states that, it was the first research work to use the online survey method. After conducting a comparative study with the German Government Statistics the answer of the first question results into negative. Second question of the research also shows low percentage in the field of school absenteeism. In response to the third question, it shows a relation with psychology and absenteeism.

Quantitative Research Design and Analytical Methods

This research paper dwells with the concept of parent’s misbeliefs as the reason of school absenteeism. The study involves two main research questions for the research activities. Firstly, to investigate the student’s total absence in terms to decrease absenteeism. Secondly, whether the absence of the typical children lead to a greater decrease in absenteeism.

The research design for this particular study includes a non-parametric approach with complete justification with randomization. For the population of the research work, the study includes the district administrative records. The records were drawn from eight largest school district of Philadelphia United States. The study failed to find meaningful treatment that effect the variation by the grade-level and gender of students with limited statistical power. However, it observed the effect of quantile effects of treatment.

This research work is built around the investigation for the causes of school absenteeism and dropouts at primary and secondary schools in the province of Düzce. It also investigates for some suggestion to solve the existing problems. As a research design the study includes the case study design as a mode of qualitative research approach.

The population for this research is 64 school principals from primary, secondary, and high schools. The instrument used for the research is a semi-structured interview with nine questions. Content analytic method was adopted to analyze the collected data. As per the findings of the research work, the root causes of school absenteeism and dropouts lies within the family. The problems were analyzed from five perspective which are relationship between the child and family members, ignoring the concept of absenteeism, problems within the family, perspective of education, and the impossibilities of economy. To measure the causes of dropouts there are another set of perspectives that includes the relationship between administration and student, relationship between student and teacher, behavior of the teachers within class, and view for absenteeism. The study concluded that lack of care towards the children and negative attitude towards the students are the causes of absenteeism and dropouts respectively.

This study contributes to find the answer of the research question that is what the causes of school absenteeism are. The research comprised of the population of 531 students at public high schools. Instrument used in this research paper is a survey model with ‘The Scale of Absenteeism Causes’ initiated by researchers. To investigate the normality of data Kolmogrov-Smirnov test was utilized.

According to the findings, the causes of school absenteeism has no relation with the school. The survey result also depicts that the students do not consider themselves as responsible for absenteeism. However, from the conclusion it can be understood that the causes of absenteeism is partly associated with the school. It includes poor teaching strategies, monotonous environment of learning, and disturbed socio-economic situations. It also incorporates with negative relationship between students and teacher. Moreover, the response of the students depicts reverse picture due to the strict management of the school.