The Research
The Project conducted a research to examine the phenomenon of minority pupil drop-out from secondary schools and to find out about its factors. The research began with the detailed recording of the school process and performance of minority pupils who were registered at secondary schools during the five-year period of 1997-2002. The researchers used, as a data gathering tool, a questionnaire (or data form) through which they collected information on the individual characteristics of pupils (gender, age, geographical origin, primary school from which the pupil graduated), and also on variables pertaining to how their studies are going (moving to the next grade, having to repeat a grade or dropping out from school, transferring to another school, and performance in classes).
The population of the research consisted of three cohorts of pupils, that is, only those minority pupils who were registered in the seventh grade (the first grade of the secondary school), irrespective of whether this registration was their first or not, in the school years 1997-98, 1999-2000, and 2001-02. The research did not examine all the registered pupils in all three grades of the secondary school in one given school year, because the goal was not a static depiction of the picture. Rather than that, the researchers used a more dynamic perspective which allowed for the rearrangement of the school process characteristics for each cohort of pupils separately (for instance, who among the pupils and how many of them complete their secondary education regularly in 3 years, who and how many graduate with a delay or drop out, etc.)
The total number of children who were registered in the seventh grade for each of the three school years includes (a) pupils who were registered for the first time, (b) others who repeated the grade, and (c) still others who were registered but did not attend school. The way researchers gathered their data made it possible to study these categories separately. And the detailed recording of data for three consecutive school years serves the need to examine the issues being researched over time. Despite the fact that the five-year period (1997-2002) that the research has analyzed is short, adding the time dimension was especially significant, because it let researchers draw conclusions that pertained to the dynamics that were at work.
The research took place during the school year 2002-03 and had the character of a comprehensive census. In other words, the researchers gathered data on the total number of minority pupils registered in the seventh grade of all the public secondary schools, the two minority secondary schools and the two Muslim religious schools in the Rhodope and Xanthi prefectures, for the school years 1997-98, 1999-2000, and 2001-02. The data was gathered from the official records of each school. Using these records, the researchers completed one questionnaire (or, rather, data form) anonymously for each registered pupil. The total number of the completed data forms was 4,259.