Practical

• What was the aim of the practical?

  To investigate whether there is a difference in the size of cars driven by males and females using observational research
• What is the IV?

  Gender (Male/Female)
• What is the DV?

  Size of the car
• What is the sampling method?

  Opportunity sampling - participants, who were available at the time, who passed the entrance of wyke between that time
• What experimental design was used?

  Independent groups design - participants are either male or female car drivers
• What is the two-tailed hypothesis?

  There will be a significant difference in the size of cares driven by male and female drivers
• What is the null hypothesis?

  There will be no significant different in the size of cars driven by male or female drivers, any difference will be due to chance
• What was the instructions?

  1. generated a list of commonly seen small or large cars

  2. agreed on coding units that 5-door were large cars and 3-door were small

  3. stood at wyke entrance for 15 minutes. One person observed the cars while the other kept a tally

  4. data was pooled, tallies were counted

  5. used a bar chart as part of descriptive statistics

  6. chi-squared test was carried out to see any significant differences

  7. thematic analysis was completed to explore common themes
• What were the results?

  The alternative hypothesis should be accepted because the calculated value of 5.89 is more than the critical value of 3.84, this means that the results collected were significant
• What was the conclusion?

  24 male drivers drove a clean, big care with female passengers while 12 female drivers drove a dirtier, big care with children in the car
• What are the strengths?

  > high ecological validity (naturalistic observation)

  > no demand characteristics

  > qualitative data, increases validity, more detailed

  > high inter-rater reliability, two observers were used

  > quantitative, objective
• What are the weaknesses?

  > validity; participants might not be driving their own car. Not all makes and models were included on the list (Subjective)

  > judgments made about cleanliness were subjective

  > low generalisability - time and location