What is peer pressure, and do all people give in to it?

For guidance. Research steps and approaches 1. An area of concern is shaped into a research question. Examples: a) What is peer pressure, and do all people give in to it? b) How do children change the way they play together as they grow older? c) Why are some people so helpless when it comes to getting out of bad situations in life? 2. After thinking a lot, reading up on what we already know, and sometimes doing some trial observations, we come up with a hypothesis, which is a more specific statement of the question, stated in terms of predicting what would be found if you did an actual study. Examples: a) The greater the number of people who all state the same thing regarding a visual perception, the more likely people will feel drawn to agree with them, even if they are wrong). b) If you observe children who are 2, 4 and 6 year olds playing together on the floor wit
h toys you can stack or build things with, the degree of social interaction and collaboration in play will increase with age. c) if present people with situations in which they are literally helpless, they will begin to take a helpless attitude even in situations they could change. 3. The hypothesis identifies two variables: the independent variable that you can manipulate, and the dependent variable which is the outcome of the manipulation you made. Examples: a) Independent variable: the number of people who agree Dependent variable: whether the participant in your study will agree with them or not. b) Independent variable: the age of the child Dependent variable: level of interaction and collaboration c) Independent variable: whether they were literally helpless in first situation Dependent variable: how long it will take them to figure out a solution in the second situation. 4) Determine specific operational definitions for each variable. Examples: a) Independent Variable: three levels: two people, three people, six people. Dependent variable: agree to a wrong assessment of which of three lines presented on a slide projection is the longest. b) Independent variable: three levels ages 2, 4, and 6. Dependent variable: 1: are children working on a joint or individual tasks. 2: The amount of verbal and non-verbal communication between children, and whether the communication aids them in completing their joint or individual tasks. c) Using dogs to test: Independent variable: being placed in the first condition in cages that can either be opened, or in cages that cannot be opened. Dependent variable: When later placed in a cage in which one side is electrified (cause a shock to dog) and the other side not electrified, how long the dog takes to cross over a low barrier to the side that is not electrified. 5. Run the study (developing specific, standard protocols). Tally the data on the dependent variable, and run statistical tests to see whether the variance that is observed between subjects is likely due to chance, or caused by the independent variable. In our examples: a) Ashe found that the minimum number who could stimulate conformity was three people, and whether the group was unanimous made a big difference. b) Parton identified several stages in collaborative play. c) Seligman & Maier found that dogs who had not been able to escape in the first condition, ended up passively accepting the shock in the second case, without even trying to escape, even though escaping the pain was easy (jumping over the low barrier). Some additional things to note: To avoid biased behavior on the part of participants, they are often not told which level of the independent variable they have received. This is called a blind study. To avoid bias in the researcher’s part, he or she is often not told which level of the independent variable the data he/she is coding or counting is from. This is called a double-blind study. Sometimes people will act differently just because they are in a study and therefore the behavior is not typical. This is called a placebo effect, in which their expectations of the study affect their behavior or perceptions. So if you do a study to figure out which of several types types of afterschool program (sports, art, tutoring) improves grades the most, if the children or parents think that the group they got placed in will improve their child’s grades, they probably will try harder anyway. Or if you think that a pill will take away your headache, then your headache may disappear, even if the “pill” was just sugar. To prevent the placebo effect, the researcher tries to have a neutral, or control group that doesn’t get any real treatment, but is in the study, and this serves as the point of comparison. In the study comparing after school programs you might have a “wait group” in which you tell people they have been selected for the study, but the groups are already full and they will join the afterschool program a soon as there is an opening. Or you might just have them sit in the library but do nothing for them. To be fair, and make sure that the effect you found is due to your independent variable rather than some other factor (gender, innate skills, etc), researchers try to: Have participants in all groups be as similar as possible (i.e. the same age) or matched in some way, such as have the same number of A students and D students in each of the afterschool programs. Another way to approach this is to have large numbers of participants (200) and to randomly assign to each group and thus assume that all the relevant extraneous factors will end up being equally distributed among the different groups.