social practical

• aim

  to investigate whether males or females perceive themselves as more obedient
• hypothesis

  there will be a significantly higher perception of obedience in females than males
• sampling & participants

  opportunity sample of 20 students aged 16-18
• procedure

  • questionnaire devised using open, closed & rank scaled questions to collect quantitative and qualitative data sent out via whatsapp, snapchat
  • 5 scenarios involving obedience given to ppts
  • asked to rate likelihood of obeying on a scale of 1-10 and asked to explain why they had given the rating
  • pilot study conducted on 3 ppts to check the questions were easy to understand
  • ppts given 10mins to complete questionnaire
• ethics

  • informed consent collected from participants
  • all information kept confidential by numbering ppts instead of names
• findings

  mean obedience score calculated for each participants using scores from 5 scenarios:

  • mean obedience for male & female: 4,6
  • range for male & female: 4,6
  • shows females more obedient than males but not a large difference so may not be significant. range shows a greater spread of scores for females suggesting some were unlikely to obey whilst others were obedient
• strength

  • i utilised various question types to gather both quantitative and qualitative data
  • open questions like 'would you obey an officer' allowed ppts to explain their reasoning behind obedience or lack of obedience while closed and rank scaled allowed me to collect objective, quantitative data about levels of obedience like 'why would you or not obey'
  • able to statistically compare differences between males and females obedience
• weakness

  • i analysed open questions myself through thematic analysis
  • i identified themes of the answers myself by finding codes and categories in the qualitative data my ppts answered in scenarios such as....why would or wouldnt you obey the officer - i could have misunderstood the meaning of the phases my ppts wrote
  • the themes i found in the open questions such as males obeying less may have been inaccurate
• graph used

  bar chart of means
• qualitative analysis

  i used thematic analysis which identified key themes in behaviours for males & females

  • resistance to authority - ppts suggested that there was a lack of trust over the instructions given by authority - only obey an officer is they showed their badge
  • need to obey - fear of consequences of not obeying ppts emphasised they felt they had to obey
• improvement 1 - social desirability bias

  • study was obviously about obedience - such as questions like on a scale of 1-10 how far would you obey?
  • i could add more distraction questions like what is your fav pizza to throw off ppts so they may answer about their obedience more honestly
• improvement 2 - thematic analysis bias

  • i could utilise multiple judges to analyse open questions on obedience to increase reliability
• conclusion

  females appear to be more obedient than males but with more variance in data group, results unlikely to be significant and therefore there is little difference in obedience levels