4.5 practical investigation Flashcards
What was my learning theories practical
And observation of the differences between how adults cross the road when they are with and without children
What was the abstract
The social learning theory proposed by Bandura concluded that role models do influence behaviour, especially when the person identifies with this role model e.g. same gender. We used this theory and the idea of adults being role models, to conduct an observation on the differences between how adults cross the road when they are with and without children. Using our statistical test, the chi Square test we accepted our alternate hypothesis and found that there was a significant difference between how adults cross the road on their own, compare to when children are present as our chi squared value was 7.894, which was more than the critical value at 1° of freedom at a 0.05 probability. we concluded that when adults are with children they are more likely to use safe methods of crossing the road e.g. using the traffic lights, however we did find gender differences. Females are more likely to savour techniques than men with and without children present, and we also found that none of the adults took the opportunity to explicitly help their children in learning about safe crossing e.g. 0% of the children did not look left or right before the crossing
What was the aim
To investigate if adults alter their behaviour when children are present as they know they are role models
What was the hypothesis
That there will be a difference between how adults cross the road on their own compared to when children are present
Procedure
36 participants all of different ages and gender. A strength of using opportunistic sampling is that it requires very little effort and you can get a lot of findings quickly, however a weakness is that you can’t generalised to the wider population as the findings are not representative of target population
This is a covert but naturalistic investigation as our participants were unaware that they were being observed. Due to this, our study was actually not standardised, which makes it harder to replicate and could have some ethical concerns as they were not aware that they were part of the investigation. Moreover the participants were not debrief, however as it was a naturalistic experiment I don’t think a debrief would be necessary. We used our phones to record our observations for a thematic analysis and to ensure that all tallies corresponded with our transcript increasing the internal validity
What were our results
during our investigation we used a tally chart to record our findings whether or not adults within without children use the green man to safely cross the road or not. After this we then use the data to create a bar chart to give us a visual representation of our data
once we have finished our observation we began our thematic analysis by creating a transcript of our observations and then created specified themes to see if there were any differences between gender and age. For example we found that eight females without children did cross with The green man even when children were not present however these findings could’ve been due to our unbalanced sample. Paragraph 1 important finding in our thematic analysis was that man in casual dress, only use the green man to cross when his children were present, as before when he was going to pick up his kids from school, he did not use the green man. We also found that the nine adults, although they did cross the road with the green man when they were with children, they didn’t use it as an explicit learning opportunity for the children or hell the children’s has been crossing the road.
evaluate practical
Generalisability: a strength of our investigation was that all of our participants were of different genders, age and had a lot of different participant variables and therefore our findings could be generalised to the wider population as we didn’t just have e.g. male participants and didn’t necessarily have a target population. Also our sample size was very unbalanced e.g. had a lot more adults and adults with children which not only made a comparing results difficult, but also our results maybe less generalisable as we didn’t observe enough adults with children
Reliability: easily replicated as it is a naturalistic observation and although we didn’t use standardise instructions the fact that we completely prevented participant bias or experimenter bias increases the reliability. Moreover I study has high interrater reliability is due to the fact that the observations were agreed and checked by four different people and I will transcript was listen to but all four of us to ensure everything correlated
validity: I will study is extremely objective as we were just observing and recording the participants behaviour and our study has high ecological validity as it was done in a natural setting
Real-world application: our study could be shown to parents in primary schools where the majority of Road safety workshops occur, which could help them understand the importance of explicitly teaching children road safety and using safe ways of crossing as they are role models
ethics: although our participants may not consented to the investigation I will not debrief, I do think our study has strengths in its ethics due to the fact there was a naturalistic observation and then mental or physical will well-being was not affected at all.
