Study Guide Anatomy

Research Proposal Project
Topic and Hypothesis Our experiment is about how people in various countries react to two people in a physical fight. We chose this topic because we wanted to see if people would be willing to step in to stop a fight, even if it meant they may be injured. Also, we wanted to know if race had anything to do with a person’s willingness to step in, thus we are conducting the study in multiple countries. Along with this we want to see if the gender of the people fighting effect peoples willingness to intervene.
From our previous experiences we were able to create a prediction of what will happen. Our prediction, hypothesis, was, if people observe other people in a physical fight, then most people will walk by no matter the country. We believe this because from our previous experiences, most people are not willing to step up in these kinds of situations. This may be because people don’t think that it’s their business or issue since they don’t know the two people. From our experiment we want to see how this situation is reacted to in various countries, thus our population will be the whole world.
To test our experiment we are going to control the people that are fighting, like gender and race. We will also be changing the country in which we are holding the experiment. Thus our independent variables are the country, along with gender and race of the two fighters. We will measure how people react to the fight and how many people step in. These will be out dependent variables, people’s reactions and how many people intervene. We will measure people’s reaction by writing down our observations of the people and we record how many stepped in on a data table.
Design
Since it will be difficult to test everyone in the world we are going to set up the experiment in the ten most populated countries in the world. Also, instead of doing it throughout the whole country we will hold the experiments in the capitol cities. Thus our sample is capitol cities of the ten most populated countries. This will also cause our sample to be random because we cannot control the people in the city, this will cause the size of the sample to vary. We are using this as a sample because the ten most populated countries in the world make up more than half the population of the world. Also the capitol city of the country is generally a representation of the population, and has a large population. Our control group will be those in the United States, so everyone we observe in the United States will be our control. Our experimental group will be the people that we observe in other countries. The selection of both the experimental and control groups will be random because we cannot control who is in the capitol or how many people are in the capitol of that country. Since our experiment is expanding over various countries it will be a cross sectional study. Also since the experiment is taking place in the real world instead of an artificial environment it is a field experiment. Thus we are conducting a cross sectional field experiment.
For the experiment itself we will go to a major area in the capitol of each country where there is a lot of human traffic. We would set up cameras and other related equipment needed to record people’s behavior. We will also have some plan clothes researchers in the crowd to record reactions. We will have two people simulate that they are fighting and see how many people step in. We will record the total number of people, people that stepped, and percent of people that intervened in Table 1 (Appendix A). We will also record important observations that can’t be record numerically on an observation sheet (Appendix A). After doing this we will repeat this experiment 2 more times for a total of 3 trials, each trial with its own table and sheet.
Evaluation
There are a few extraneous and confounding variables that we found in our study. One would be the size of the fighters. This would affect our study because if the fighters are two strong looking guys bystanders would probably be less likely to intervene. They might walk by because they know that they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. If the fighters are two average looking guys some bystanders might step in and try to stop it. Another variable that might affect the study is the gender of the fighters. If it’s two men compared to two women or even a man and a women. The culture would also affect the study. In some areas of the world people might just walk by if people are fighting. In other areas people might try and stop it. This is one advantage of a cross-sectional field study. The advantages and disadvantages of the cross-sectional field study are evident in our study. One advantage would be that we can get various views of the world. How people react to a fight in public an if some people are more willing to intervene than others. Since we are doing it in the most populated areas we can get a general idea of can happen. Another advantage is the closeness to a realistic event. The only people that know it’s an experiment would be the fighters. So people will react the way they normally would. A disadvantage if this study is we have almost no control of the conditions. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The way people will react, the measures they go through to break up the fight, if any one is in real harm or not. So not knowing what will happen is another disadvantage. A potential problem that might affect our data is how to determine if someone has intervened enough for it to count towards our data. It might be hard because someone might intervene but not stop the fight. The problem with reliability and validity might be that the fighters have to make it look real. If it doesn’t look real enough then people probably wont intervene.