Balwearie
High School,
Kirkcaldy
Balwearie
High School is a large comprehensive high school situated in the West of
Kirkcaldy with approximately 1700 pupils. It was built in 1964. The motto is To
Strive, To Seek.
The
facilities include a swimming pool, games hall, an astroturf pitch, a 400m
running track, dance studios, science, music and home economics departments,
technology workshops, 2 cafeterias and a large assembly hall.
There are many extra-curricular
activities currently run in Balwearie, including Netball, Football, Badminton,
Orchestras, Choirs and annual theatrical performances. The school is also actively
involved in a partnership with a primary school in Cape Town, South Africa.
There are biannual fundraising events held such as the recent Welcome Walk in
September 2015.
Kirkcaldy, Scotland
Kirkcaldy
is a large costal town in the east of Scotland, in Fife with approximately
49,461 people. It is famous for its past in coal mining and linoleum
production.
Famous people from Kirkcaldy
include: Adam Smith (Social Philosopher), Gordon Brown (Former Prime Minister),
Guy Berryman (bassist for Coldplay) and David Potter (Founder of Arsenal
Football Club).
Current
attractions include, a new leisure centre, high street, town house, theatre,
college and picturesque cost line.
The
fairground attraction ‘The Links Market’ arrives on the Prom in Kirkcaldy in
mid April each year. It is the longest street fair in Europe and oldest in
Scotland.
In order
to find out more about media use in our local area of Kirkcaldy, our Erasmus
group conducted a survey. We went to Morrison’s (the local supermarket) and
asked members of our community to share their opinions regarding access to the
news and media. The questions included age range, gender, and the choice of
media source used to read the news the most often, how often they make use of
different media sources and which media source is the most reliable.
As it
was a Wednesday evening, we discovered that some people weren’t very willing to
respond to our survey, possibly due to coming back from a long day at work. We
felt as though older people were more likely to want to answer our questions
and showed an interest in our project and our research whereas younger people
appeared to be quite dismissive and busy. This was demonstrated in the results
of our survey as 45% of those surveyed were over fifty one years of age. There
was a trend that the older the person was, the more likely they were to take
our survey with an exception to the age category “0-17”, who were more likely
to be surveyed than people in an age bracket of eighteen to thirty.
We also
observed that women were more likely than men to respond to our survey, with
57% respondents being female, although as a group we tended to approach women
as they seemed more amenable than men.
Following
our recent survey at Morrison’s supermarket, of the 100 people, TV was used the
most often (27%) with the internet (23%) and newspapers (20%) close behind. Radio
(13%) and social media (17%) were used least often.
As the
graph above shows, most media sources are used daily, with TV used most often
by most people.
Following on from that, TV
was seen as the most reliable with 51%. However, Newspapers (8%) and Social
Media (6%) were not seen as reliable.
When we
investigate the results we find that over 50s tended to use newspapers more
often but this reduced drastically for under 50s. Generally under 17s used social media more
than other groups. Clearly the media
used can differ depending on the age of the user in Kirkcaldy.
