LITERATURE REVIEW

LITERATURE REVIEW
Karim (2012),a newspaper article taken from the Trinidadian Guardian,titled “Peer Pressure and its Image” gave an insight to the research paper being done .This newspaper article goes into details on the various reasons as to why students give in to Peer pressure, the author states that students fail to realize their own talents instead they suppress it so that they will not be ostracized or put to shame by others if they are different research objective (1), (3). The author also includes the many consequences of Peer Pressure on students, with respect to the research objective (2) that peer pressure exerted overwhelms most students into ignoring their natural ability, to tap the skill given to them by some higher power and Peer pressure can debilitate a person’s motivation and cause them to steer away from their true desires all in the name of fitting in.
Dr.Brown (2012),an article written for the University of Michigan site, contained information on Peer Pressure. This article entailed some causes of Peer Pressure on adoloscents.It states that peers play a major role in a young person’s life and teenagers at this age wants to be liked ,to fit in as they are worried they will be made fun of if they do not go along with the group. “The idea that "everyone's doing it" may influence some kids to leave their better judgment, or their common sense, behind. “The study also describes two levels of Peer Pressure; one occurring in a large group while the second is in the close relationships with one or several best friends. The article correlates with my research objective (2) giving an insight to the causes of Peer Pressure on adolescents.
Consequently, information was gathered from a newspaper article of the Guyana Times (2014).This article entailed reasons why students give in to peer pressure and also the many effects it can pursue on their life. It therefore correlates to the objectives one, two and three of this research. The article described that students want to be liked by their peers and would not want to be ridiculed so instead they do what everyone else is doing even if it is wrong. “Children want to be liked, that’s why they give in to peer pressure, because they just want to fit in, or they worry that if they don’t go along with the group, other kids might make fun of them. The reality is that if we choose friends who would not use drugs and skip/cut class etc., and then they probably won’t be involved in those activities. Even if a child is alone, s/he can still face peer pressure.”

Lastly, for this research a case study was examined, this case study was done by Dr.Dobson (2013),“Why is social Peer Pressure so great on adolescence?” The case study performed included, a team of doctors who decided to conduct an experiment to study the ways in which group pressure influences young people. To accomplish this, they invited 10 teenagers into a room and told them they were going to evaluate their "perception" to learn how well each student could "see" the front of the room from where he sat. However that was not the case, the doctors were actually studying the effects of peer pressure. The doctors said, "We're going to hold up some cards at the front of the room. On each card are three lines, line A, Line B, Line C, each of different length, raise your hand for which is of the longest.” What one student didn't know was that the other nine had been secretly informed earlier to vote for the second longest line. In other words, they were told to vote wrongly. Seemingly, when it was time to vote the one student who had not known ended up voting for the wrong line even though it was clear that the answer was wrong, he did so due to the fact that everyone else had their hands up. All in all the case study showed what effect peer pressure can have on an insecure person.