Can someone help me figure out the psychological aspect of my observational experiment?

Question

I want to do an experiment on who curse more at my collge gender wise. The proposal is on friday. I'm not certain on how to present the idea. I want to go around my school listen to people conversations to hear who curses more, male or female.
So far I came up with a list of swear words checklist and considering if I should get a stop watch to see how long it take between each incident. Also should I add racial slurs to the eqaution? Or based some vaiables on same gender or mix genders etc....

I can only sit down and observe nothing else.

Answer 1

For a start, keep the experiment as simple as possible.
Keep all those different variables out of it. Don't add more curse words, or slurs to your list. In fact, do the opposite, and trim it down to a few curse, swear words, that are commonly used at your school.
You are asking them if they swear a lot on your questionnaire? Are you doing this type of self-assessment?

Or are you going to sit and count the number of times a person swears while talking to you? I think you may need to go with the self-assessment, and ask very specific questions to people.
You'd have to say how long you would listen to them, and then even people who swear a lot may not swear at all in a short amount of time. You may end up with no results, or perhaps results that aren't meaningful to the phenomenon you are trying to study. For instance, you may come across the 'social desirability shift', which would mean people wouldn't swear in front of you because they are on their best behaviour. You won't be getting good results.

Also make sure you have as many males as females, and say who your population is going to be.
Keep it simple, do male versus female. The less variables the better and more meaningful the experiment and it's results will be.

Answer 2

The psychology of cursing is the question you're asking.

Cursing is a verbal behavior based an a learned response to certain situations.

The situations, and individuals, and types of learned responses give too many variables to provide a meaningful answer.

It would be easier and more meaningful to ask each gender how powerful the curse words are.

Individuals who rank the "power" of curse words lower would have a higher incidence of using them.

Individuals who rank the "power" of curse words high would tend to use them in only certain circumstances.

By selecting a number of individuals from both genders you can then rank the "threshold" that induces the cursing. This would give you a good experiment on which gender has the lower "threshold" for cursing and tends to curse more.

Answer 3

There are several variables that you could add. For instance: Is the participant talking to someone of the same gender? Is the participant talking to a group or just one other person? Where are you going to observe? Is this a location where others can hear the conversation? Location should be the same for all. Does the participant know you are listening? If they know, that may influence your result. You should decide how long you are going to observe each participant and keep that time the same for all.

Answer 4

First of all what you want to do is completely out of the question - you can't just sit around and listen to ppl talk - maybe you could record ppl conversing in a room - I like erathossd's idea - also what about you type out a passage and in between all the words write swear words - then tell ppl to read it and to skip any words they want - compare how many swear words are skipped by each gender on average

Answer 5

You could describe your experiment as "a study of the communication styles of males and females."

One of the things you might want to make a note of in your study is *who* the person (that you are observing) is speaking to. This is an important variable that could have an impact on the results of your study.

I agree with the other post - you don't want your study to become too complicated. Just pick a few key variables that you want to study.

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

Listen to 25 females and 25 males.
Record in 5 minutes of talk how many times they cursed.
Then average each one out, and you will have percentages.
You can add them up and have one for each gender.
Limit you curse words to three most popular.

Answer 7

You have to have a common experience or environment to judge male and female response in terms of cussing in order to have usable data. Also I would stick to one category of words and not complicate it with racial slurs.