Our study is based on the theory of operant conditioning and Banduras social learning theory. Investigation into the relationship between car size and gender.

Evidence of Practice: Learning Approach

Abstract

Our study is based on the theory of operant conditioning and Bandura’s social learning theory. Operant conditioning states that learning happens through association, and we believe that car advertises are trying to make their target population associate buying their car with a desired characteristic/traits/lifestyles e.g. having a lot of female attention. Skinner described the ABC model of operant conditioning, which includes an antecedent, behaviour and a consequence. Bandura for his theory stated that learning can only occur if the four criteria (attention, retention, reproduction and motivation) were met.
From looking at YouTube adverts we found that smaller cars had a tendency to have more feminine themes whereas larger cars tended to have more masculine themes.

Aim

To whether there is a difference between gender and the size of cars they drive.

Alternative Hypothesis:

Males will have a higher tendency to drive large cars while females will have a higher tendency to drive smaller cars

Null Hypothesis:

There will be no difference in gender and the size of the car they drive, and any difference will be due to chance.

METHOD:

Design:

This is an independent group design and a quasi experiment as each participant can only be in either the male or the female category. We will gather our data by tallying, as our study will only include nominal data. This is useful as tallying is easy to analyse and draw up conclusions from. We are only looking at the gender of the driver and the type/size of their cars, so our data is quantitative. This is a non-participant naturalistic overt observation. Seeing as our results are nominal, this is an independent group design and the hypothesis predicts a difference.

We will try our best to operationalise our variables by tallying the cars for the same period of time and by collecting data in different locations throughout Maidstone. Our IV will be the gender and how dependent variable (DV) will be the size of the cars. To make it easier to see the driver or the car, we will be collecting our data by a set of traffic lights, and tallying in the correct sections.

Participants

All of our participants will be over 17, as this is the legal minimum driving age. We will be using opportunity sampling as ...

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Participants

All of our participants will be over 17, as this is the legal minimum driving age. We will be using opportunity sampling as only those driving at the time of the study will take part in the study.

Apparatus

Pen, paper and clipboard

Procedure

A table was draw up to collect results in (a copy can be found in appendix)
Researchers decided time and place of when they will be getting results
Researches went to location, stood by the nearest traffic light and collect results
Next lesson, the results were pooled
Adjustments were made
Carried out inertial test using chi-squared test

Control:

Pilot study was not to include family and sports cars as they are marketed differently and tend to be gender neutral. We increased our ecological validity by carrying out the experiment in different places in Maidstone.

Ethics

We followed most of the ethical guidelines by: ensuring that no participants were harmed physically or psychology and that the results were anonymous. Participants were not given fully-informed consent and were not debriefed as this would be too time consuming, but if a participant was to ask about our study they would have been told the true aim of the study and having their results omitted if they want to.

RESULTS

We will accept our null hypothesis and reject our alternative hypothesis because our observed value (1.34) of chi-squared is lower than the critical value(3.841) and this means our results aren’t significant. Therefore the probability of our results being due to chance equal p<0.5.

Evaluation

Our results are not generalisable because our participants are only form Maidstone and surroundings areas. People from different areas may have different cars and adverts in different cars might be marketed differently where males may not necessarily drive large cars and females drive small cars. To improve the study, we could look at adverts from other countries and if they are different, we could see whether they have an effect on the drivers.

By using opportunity sampling, our results were not representative because there might be different people that only drive specifically during a certain time of day.

Our results are not reliable as they have inter rater reliability and also it is likely that participants may not have been driving their own car – they might have been driving a family member’s car or a company car – either way they might have not necessarily been driving their own car. This means our results would be unreliable because we are trying to find out if advertising influences a person’s choice in cars – we would have to ask the participants if they are driving their own cars and discard the results of those who aren’t. However, this is would be too time consuming and the only way of doing this efficiently is to do it in a car park but this would mean our sample size would be small.
We can also tell that our results aren’t replicable as other members of our class had different results and did accept their alternative hypothesis (we all carried out the same tasks with the same aim but under different conditions) and they are not similar to the key study (Bandura) as his study would suggest that advertising would have an effect on people’s choice on the size of the car.

Also, there are other factors that may influence the choice on car, for example the cost of the car. Our results were made insignificant because there were more males driving small cars than large cars but overall there were more small cars than large cars observed in the experiment and this could be due to smaller cars being cheaper rather than the way they are being observed.

We could carry out the experiment at different types to have more control over extraneous variables in order to try and improve our study.

Seeing as our results show that there is no difference between gender and the size of the car, it seems that our study would have applications to real life as it shows that advertisers are wasting their money marketing their cars specifically to male/females.

The study was valid in that it was a naturalistic observation of real driving behaviour that was not affected by the observer. The drivers of the cars were either male or female. Also, our study has face validity as there are different opinions on types and the sizes of cars, even though there was a general outline, most of us did get confused about some cars and to those that we could not categorise were not included in the study.

Our study would be ethical regardless of the fact that informed consent was not given as if participants were to ask us about the study; they would be informed about the true aim.

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