Design A Psychology Experiment

Kyle Park
11th Grade
AP Psychology
09/23/14
Design a Psychology Experiment

The topic that I chose for my experiment is very intriguing and fascinating because most people own pets while raising children. It would be interesting to find out if these various pets can help children with their academic studies. Pets, such as dogs and cats, help children with social skills and interactions with society. Children can learn myriad lessons just from being around domesticated animals. I believe that children who have pets would be more academically successful and developed than children who don’t raise pets because pets benefit children in many aspects from health to responsibility. For my experiment, the independent variable would be the kid or children with a pet or without, and the dependent variable would be whether the children own the pets get better scores in homework or quizzes than the children who don’t own pets. Selecting my subjects would be easy. I will choose a kid who owns a pet and another kid who has never owned a pet before. Some errors in this experiment could be that the kids who have never owned a pet could be naturally smarter than those who have a pet. The kids without pets could be smart from genetics and the environment might have affected heavily. Another huge aspect would be the subject of the quiz. Every kid is good and bad at different subjects. I can fix this by bringing in kids who are equally good or bad at a certain subject. My experiment will be like a test. I will have my two kid subjects (who are the same age and grade) and place them in two separate rooms. I would tell the kid with a pet to bring his/her pet with her to the room. I would then give both kids an identical quiz and ask them to solve the problems freely. The pet is allowed to move around the room and the kid is allowed to touch their pet. I will give both kids more than enough time to not stress them out. I will try this test on many other children and study my results. I would compare the results of how much difference there is and come up with my conclusion. In my opinion, I believe that if this experiment was really conducted, it will have many errors and bias in it. I think this because children are unpredictable and some kids might be smarter than one another, regardless of whether they have a pet or not. However, I believe that if there were two identical kids who took part of this experiment, the kid with the pet would do better. This experiment is, actually, very unpredictable because every kid is different in many aspects. Therefore, this experiment, in reality would be extremely difficult to conduct and record. I would definitely modify the type of pet and their effectiveness, environment, the age of the test subjects and the number of pets. Modifying the aspects of the experiment would really help us understand how we interact with different types of domesticated animals. An ethical issue to consider in this experiment is if the children want to take part or if they are not comfortable, also, if their pets feel uncomfortable in the room where the quiz is held.