practical

Question 1

what was the aim of the practical

Answer 1

The aim of our investigation was to investigate prosocial behaviour amongst year 12 and year 13 students at alcester grammar school

Question 2

what was the IV

Answer 2

Year 12 and year 13 students between the ages of 16 to 18 at alcester grammar school

Question 3

what was the DV

Answer 3

The prosocial behaviour displayed in each year group (12 and 13) saying thank you and smiling when collecting their lunch

Question 4

what is the research hypothesis

Answer 4

There will be a significant difference between the number of students showing prosocial behaviour in year 12 and the number of students showing prosocial behaviour in year 13 by saying thank you and smiling.

Question 5

is the research hypothesis one or two tailed

Answer 5

Two tailed because we haven’t stated who will show more prosocial behaviour only that there will be a difference

Question 6

what research method was used

Answer 6

The research method we used was a covert naturalistic observation by observing the number of prosocial behaviours of saying thank you and smiling in the canteen at lunch by year 13 and year 12 students recording a tally.

Question 7

what was the sampling method

Answer 7

We used opportunity sampling to conduct our observation as it was a quick and convenient method that enabled us to observe the year 12 and year 13 students in the canteen at lunch on their prosocial behaviours of saying thank you and smiling.

Question 8

write a method

Answer 8

Our practical investigation took place during period 4A and 4B where we would go to the school canteen and observe the prosocial behaviour of saying thank you and smiling by students in year 12 and year 13 who were aged 16-18 at alcester grammar school, we record the prosocial behaviours on a data sheet we had created in advance observing qualitative data of how each person said thank such as the tone of voice and the specific words they used and quantitative data of how many people smiled in tally form. We used opportunity sampling of the people in the canteen at the time of our investigation. We sat amongst other students in the canteen opposite the till and collected our data for 10 minutes for each condition of year 12 or year 13 students.

Question 9

what ethical considerations were made

Answer 9

After the students left the till be debriefed each student telling them the aim of our study investigating prosocial behaviour through an observation of looking at saying thank you and smiling giving them their right to withdraw and gaining consent for us to use their data

Question 10

describe the quantitative analysis

Answer 10

First we added up the total of the year 12 and then the year 13 students who said thank you and smiled and put them into a table labelling the cells A B C and D. we then carried out a Chi squared stats test enabling us to see see if our results were significant and decide which hypothesis we should accept once we calculated our chi squared value we compared it to the critical value from a table to decide if our results were significant

Question 11

describe the qualitative analysis

Answer 11

We carried out a thematic analysis on the quotes we recorded from how each participant said thank you and then sorting them into themes. We going that our main themes were facial expressions and speech.

Question 12

what stats test was used any why

Answer 12

Chi squared
Nominal data through tallying the number of people saying thank you and smiling
Independent measures design as the students were either year 13 or year 12
To test a difference between the prosocial behaviour shown by each year group

Question 13

what was the stats test results

Answer 13

We found that our results were not significant at the 0.05 level of significance. Our calculated value of 0.228 was less than the critical value of 3.84 for a two tailed hypothesis . therefore there is an equal to or more than 5% probability that our results were due to chance. Therefore we can accept the null hypothesis and conclude that there is no significant difference between the number of students showing prosocial behaviour in year 12 and the number of students showing prosocial behaviour in year 13 by saying thank you and smiling.

Question 14

what conclusion could be made

Answer 14

There is no significant difference between the number of students showing prosocial behaviour in year 12 and the number of students showing prosocial behaviour in year 13 by saying thank you and smiling due the the results of our chi squared. We can also conclude that there was a common theme of saying thank you politely and smiling without teeth showing that both year groups do show prosocial behaviour

Question 15

what were the strengths

Answer 15

One strength of our learning practical investigation is that we had inter observer reliability. In our group there were 3 people recording the prosocial behaviours that were being shown through saying thank you and smiling by the year 12s and year 13s. This means we could compare the number of people we saw smiling and saying thank you with each other so we can check for accuracy. This makes our results more reliable.
Another strength of our investigation was that we chose to observe the prosocial behaviour of every other year 12 and year 13 we saw in the canteen. This means that we were recording and observing the individuals carefully recording each thank you and smile in data so increase the validity of our final conclusions

Question 16

what were the weaknesses and improvements

Answer 16

One weakness of our learning practical investigation is that we observed the proscial behaviours of smiling and saying thank you of the 2 year groups, 12 and 13, at different times of the day and on different days of the week. This may create unwanted variables that may affect the validity of the results. To improve this we should make sure to conduct our observations into prosocial behaviour on the same sar and at the same time so that we reduce the extraneous variable making the conditions of year 12 and year 13 as similar as possible.
Another weakness is that we only used year 12 and year 13 students from alcester grammar school. They therefore may not represent the prosocial behaviours of smiling and saying thank you that you would see at different schools. Therefore the results may not be valid and generalisable. To improve this we should repeat our covert naturalistic prosocial behaviour observation at different schools in different canteens to get a bigger more representative sample.