Psychology Era - Animal Welfare Experiment and Prac Report

Psychology ERA - Animal Welfare Experiment and Prac Report.

ERA - Animal Welfare Experiment and Prac Report.

By *&^% ^%$#@

Aim:

The aim of this survey experiment is to establish whether an individuals beliefs about an issue are demonstrated consistantly through their responses to the five questions asked about a particular issue, or whether cognitive dissonance is present. In addition to that, the results of each exclusive group can be compared to eachother, to see whether it affects their answers and subsequently, their attitudes.

Hypothesis:

Each person's responses will be relatively consistent according to the belief they hold on the topic and that there will be minimal variation. The results between males and females will not neccesarily be similar or dissimilar, as it is a mutual topic which affects males and femals equally, therefor the discrepancy that may arise between the different results will be due to the individual belief systems and attitude, and not neccesarily their gender. However I do believe that most people do care about the welfare of animals, and I am anticipating a mean score between 3.8 and 4.5 for each group.

Method:

This experiment was conducted by surveying 5 femals and 5 males on the same 5 statements and asking them to rank whether they strongly agreed, all the way to strongly disagreed, with the statement.

Paricipants: 5 females and 5 males, not age specific.

Materials: *stationary to write statements and record responses with,

*appropriate materials to write up the report, including graphs

eg: notebook, pen, calculator, graph papers

Design: Dependent variable is the thing that is being measured, which in this experiment's case is the response.

The independant variable is the gender of the participant.

Procedure:

step 1. Create 5 questions relating to your chosen topic

step 2. Choose two mutually exclusive groups you wish to survey. Eg. male and females, primary school and high school students.

step 3. Survey each group and record their responses to the 5 questions.

step 4. Collate the results and calculate a mean score for each group. This is done by converting the 'aggreement rating' into a numerical score (eg. SA=5, A=4, N=3, D=2, SD=1), then adding up all the scores and dividing by 30 to achieve the mean.

step 5. Review the final results and determine what conclusion you can make and whether these results support your initial hypothesis.

step 6. Write up your results, either in the form of a prac report, or depict the results through graphs, to demonstrate to others your findings and to have as future refference.

The statements participants were surveyed on:

"Testing products/medications/technology etc on animals should be illegal, even if humans stand to gain significantly from the results."

"It is unacceptable to eat animals."

"I wouldn't wear/support the purchase of furr, but I don't see a problem with leather products."

"Keeping animals in zoos' or circus' is acceptable if made that animals have adequate supply of food, water and shelter."

"I would choose free range eggs over battery hen laid eggs if I were shopping at the supermarket."

"As humans we have the right to hunt animals for recreational purposes."

Results:

The raw data was processed by converting the 'agreement rating' into a numerical score.

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