AP Psychology: Naturalic Observation
Megan Stark and Hanna Spruill
Mr. Donner
AP Psychology
9 October 2012
Naturalistic Observation 1. Hypothesis: If a school age person goes to Starbucks, then they will order an iced drink. 2. The specific prediction that we were making is that the younger that a person is that goes to Starbucks, the more likely they are to get an iced drink. We both felt this would be true because many kids seem not to like coffee and young teens often enjoy the Frappuccino’s because they taste similar to a milkshake. 3. The operational definitions of the variables in our hypothesis are how to tell what age kids are, and whether a drink is cold or hot. Quite easily we could tell the difference between the cold and hot drinks because they
come in two separate cups. For the age of the kids, we judged it based on what we believed to be high school aged kids and under looked like. 4. We avoided intervening in this situation by sitting at a table off to the side of Starbucks and did not ask people questions who were buying their drinks. We tried to blend into the surroundings by just having casual conversation and drank coffee. 5. We planned to do our observation on a weekend at the mall when it was busy. We did our observation for about an hour and took data from about all drinks purchased, whether they were old or young. We made our observations from a table outside of the booth that Starbucks has at the Eastview Mall. We only observed one time around noon because we figured that it would be very busy because of a long weekend and would be able to get all of the data that we needed. 6. The aspect that may have affected our experiment is the time of day. We figured that more people would have gone to Starbucks during the time that we were there because it was around lunch time. Also, we could have misjudged some peoples ages in the experiment. Lastly, some school-age kids may not have come to the mall until later in the day. 7. As our hypothesis stated, almost four times more school aged kids got iced drinks compared to hot drinks. Eleven school age kids got cold drinks while only three got hot drinks. 8. School-aged kids were more likely to order iced drinks than hot drinks at Starbucks.
Mr. Donner
AP Psychology
9 October 2012
Naturalistic Observation 1. Hypothesis: If a school age person goes to Starbucks, then they will order an iced drink. 2. The specific prediction that we were making is that the younger that a person is that goes to Starbucks, the more likely they are to get an iced drink. We both felt this would be true because many kids seem not to like coffee and young teens often enjoy the Frappuccino’s because they taste similar to a milkshake. 3. The operational definitions of the variables in our hypothesis are how to tell what age kids are, and whether a drink is cold or hot. Quite easily we could tell the difference between the cold and hot drinks because they
come in two separate cups. For the age of the kids, we judged it based on what we believed to be high school aged kids and under looked like. 4. We avoided intervening in this situation by sitting at a table off to the side of Starbucks and did not ask people questions who were buying their drinks. We tried to blend into the surroundings by just having casual conversation and drank coffee. 5. We planned to do our observation on a weekend at the mall when it was busy. We did our observation for about an hour and took data from about all drinks purchased, whether they were old or young. We made our observations from a table outside of the booth that Starbucks has at the Eastview Mall. We only observed one time around noon because we figured that it would be very busy because of a long weekend and would be able to get all of the data that we needed. 6. The aspect that may have affected our experiment is the time of day. We figured that more people would have gone to Starbucks during the time that we were there because it was around lunch time. Also, we could have misjudged some peoples ages in the experiment. Lastly, some school-age kids may not have come to the mall until later in the day. 7. As our hypothesis stated, almost four times more school aged kids got iced drinks compared to hot drinks. Eleven school age kids got cold drinks while only three got hot drinks. 8. School-aged kids were more likely to order iced drinks than hot drinks at Starbucks.