Week 14 Advanced Portfolio Submission
Instruction: For this week, you may submit 2 advanced portfolio items (one based on a classical experiment, and one based on a web or natural based experiment).
In order to demonstrate your understanding both of the operation of social science experiments as well as what types of research questions/topics are appropriate for experimental methods, you are to submit an idea for an experimental method and outline the main components of the experiment. You may choose any idea/research question you wish, but you must offer at least 2 justifications for using an experiment.
Once you have completed discussed the focus of your experiment (if written, you need to have 1-2 decent paragraphs), you need to identify the key components of this experiment. This must include: how many control and experimental groups you have, what manipulation(s) you will be exposing the experimental group(s), your dependent variable, and your independent variable. You will need to conclude with a justification for your expectation regarding the relationship of the dependent and independent variables. If written, this should also take a decent sized paragraph to fully address.
*As mentioned in the first part of the instructions, you may submit a classical experiment, a web/natural experiment, or both if you wish to make two advanced submissions this week.
Example:
I propose using a natural design experiment to examine the degree to which being identified as Black/African American plays a factor in fear of âstrangeâ social others. The primary question of this research is whether individuals display a greater degree of avoidance to individuals dressed in socially inappropriate ways (e.g., wearing a bathing suit when waiting for a campus bus to downtown). This question is appropriate for an experimental design because directly asking individuals about the effect of race will likely trigger a level of interview bias, with the research subjects intentionally providing answers to appear non-racist (as a result of social stigma attached to overt racism). Even if no interview bias type effect is present, any form of data collection other than an actual experiment will not be able to capture the degree to which a response occurs due to time-constraints of any given situation (e.g., not having a great deal of time to ponder whether somebody is potentially a threat).
For this natural experiment, there will be one control and experimental group. The control group will consist of students boarding the Kent Downtown PARTA bus at a specific time, with a research confederate identified as White boarding wearing inappropriate clothing for such a bus trip. The experimental group will consist of the same general setup, but instead the research confederate will be an individual identified as Black/African American. The primary manipulation in this experiment is race. The primary dependent variable is aversion, while the independent variable is race of research confederate. I expect that the experimental group will demonstrate higher levels of aversion compared to the control group due to socialized meanings identifying Black individuals as more âdangerousâ as well as prior research demonstrating that Black individuals are more likely to be falsely perceived as suffering from a dangerous mental illness.