ATTITUDES OF STUDENTS, PARENTS AND TEACHERS TOWARDS THE USE OF CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS

if This study investigated attitudes of students, parents and teachers towards the use, of corporal punishment in three senior secondary schools. The sample consisted of 360 students, 175 parents and 60 teachers (n = 595 respondents). Parents ' and teachers ' ages ranged between 23 and 79 years, whereas students ' ages ranged between 13 and 29 years. Three researcher-designed questionnaires and an interview schedule were used to collect data aimed at measuring attitudes of respondents through the Likert Scale as well as open-ended items requiring opinion. Having been granted permission by the Education Department to administer questionnaires in schools, a pilot study was carried out on a relatively small scale, with respondents roughly similar to those of the final study. This was followed by the administration of questionnaires to each school in turns. Parents ' meetings created an opportunity of administering questionnaires for parents and an audiotape was used for recording interviews. This study presents the first step in the development of a measuring scale, the validity of which will only become apparent after extensive use by subsequent researchers, subjecting their data to meta-analysis. The collected data were analyzed through the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The crosstabulation of raw data was used to investigate differences among subjects that fall into different categories. To find the significance of differences, the chi-squared test was used. Only items reflecting 'significant differences were discussed, with the level of significance set between o.ol an