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Stony Brook School of Nursing Application Essay
Stony Brook School of Nursing Application Essay
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Stony Brook School of Nursing Application Essay
Personal Qualities and Attributes
I know being a nurse is both a rewarding and challenging profession because of its demanding nature. However, I firmly believe I possess exceptional personal qualities and attributes that will continue to serve me incredibly well in my future career endeavors. Firstly, I am an empathetic person. Because of my capacity for empathy, I will be able to put myself in the position of my patients and treat each one uniquely. Secondly, I pay close attention to detail, which I believe will help me complete my nursing tasks with accuracy and thoroughness and avoid medical errors. Moreover, I am a kind person, and it is in my nature to care about the well-being of those around me, which will help me provide friendly nursing care. I also possess exceptional teamwork skills. Lastly, I possess exceptional interpersonal skills, with the ability to interact with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. This attribute will enable me to establish a healthy relationship with patients as I help them during their vulnerable times.
Despite the personal skills and attributes that I feel I have fully developed; I also have other skills that need further development in preparation for my nursing profession. Firstly, I need to improve my time management skills because I understand that being a nurse means working in a pressurized and fast-paced environment. I want to sharpen my time management skills so that in the future, I can have all my tasks completed on time despite the pressure in the profession. Secondly, my communication skills will need to be developed further as I prepare to enter nursing. Although I can communicate effectively with patients, their family members, and my colleagues with ease, I need to further develop my communication skills to a point where I can decipher my patients’ feelings through listening and understanding their body language as well as learn how to share vital information with the patient’s family.
Definition of key Concepts and their Application in Nursing Professional Practice
In my view, cultural competence can be defined as the healthcare providers’ capability to render quality healthcare to patients while demonstrating cultural awareness of their race, beliefs, and values. As a nurse, I will incorporate cultural competence in my professional practice by respecting and not judging patients’ religious backgrounds and beliefs and encouraging them to do what works best for them. On the other hand, ethical sensitivity entails giving attention to ethical values that are involved in a conflicting situation and self-awareness of one’s responsibility and role in such a situation. In my future practice as a nurse, I will incorporate ethical sensitivity by ensuring that ethical guidelines, especially those pertaining to sharing patient data with a third party, such as a family member, are upheld. Leadership is the act of leading and directing a group of people. I will incorporate leadership in my nursing practice by leading patients and answering all their questions about their medical conditions compassionately and professionally. Life-long learning, in my view, is a form of self-motivated education aimed at personal development. I will incorporate life-long learning in my nursing profession by enrolling in online nursing career development courses.
How Graduate Education in Nursing Will Impact my Future Career Goals
Graduate education in nursing will serve as a stepping stone towards the realization of my future career goal of rendering quality healthcare services to patients and touching many lives globally. Firstly, graduate education will equip me with relevant skills for rendering improved patient care. This is because, through graduate education, I will be able to learn advanced and additional techniques to improve the quality of care rendered to patients. Also, graduate education will help improve my healthcare decision-making skills. Through graduate education, I will be able to advance my knowledge of how to apply data to make proper decisions through evidence-based practice.
Furthermore, graduate education will expand my healthcare knowledge, impacting my future career goals. This will be made possible through covering topics such as healthcare research analysis and healthcare innovation, which are covered in detail at the graduate level. Graduate education will equip me with new nursing skills. For instance, I will learn how to automate clinical care, a skill I currently do not have. Graduate education will also improve knowledge and capacity to play an integral role in driving change within community health. For instance, graduate education will provide me with relevant skills for developing, planning, implementing, and evaluating health programs and services for needy people.
Also, graduate education will expand my career opportunities, making it easier for me to serve a large patient population and touch more patients’ lives, which is my main future career goal. Lastly, graduate education will allow me to specialize in my most passionate area of healthcare and focus my career solely on this field. I feel more privileged to facilitate elder patient treatment by performing point-of-care tests, prioritizing their treatment, and making them content with the kind of medical care I accord them. I wish to become a gerontologist and render quality healthcare to elderly patients in the US. For years, elderly patients in the US have been receiving about half of the recommended. I want to specialize in gerontology and ensure that elderly patients receive quality care. This will allow me to meet my career goal of rendering quality healthcare and touching the lives of many patients.
Stonehenge – One Of The Seven Wonders Of The World
Stonehenge – One Of The Seven Wonders Of The World
Stonehenge is hailed as one of the seven wonders of the world. But why is it called a “wonder” ? With science so advanced as to being able to clone mammals, one would thing their would be rarely any discoveries left to be made. However Stonehenge is shrouded in nothing more than merely theories and guesses based on little or no fact. Being that we do know very little, You have yo ask yourself a few questions. What was the purpose of Stonehenge being built, and that being said how was it constructed. There are thousands of ideas and speculations.
The more likely correct and accepted theories may just surprise you. As you know, there has not been even one major structure built in the future nor the past that was ever completed by one man alone. Like Stonehenge they were major undertakings involving many people with many skills. Those who made Stonehenge succeeded in creating an incredibly complex and mysterious structure that lived on long after its creators had passed on. The many aspects of Stonehenge and the processes by which it was built delve into the levels of intelligence and sophistication of the civilizations used to designed and build massive the monument, despite the fact that it is difficult to find out who exactly these people were. They have left very little evidence behind with which we could get a better idea of their everyday lives, their culture, their surroundings, and their affairs with other peoples. The technology and wisdom that are inevitably required in constructing such a monument show that these prehistoric peoples had had more expertise than expected.
The planning and assembling of Stonehenge took a very long time ( 1000 years, from 2900 B.C. to 1600 B.C.), and not one but many different groups of people were involved in the process. How they came about plays an important role in understanding them. Some of the first men to come to England that are identified as Stonehenge architects came when the massive mountains of sheet ice that were then blocking England and France melted around 12,000 B.C. After their safe journey through the barrens, people came from the mainland, and had great influence on those already living there.
The first Tribe involved in the construction of Stonehenge was the Windmill Hill Tribe who arrived in the Neolithic Era of time. These people were semi-nomadic agriculturalists who mainly just fed and maintained their flocks of cattle, sheep, goats, and wild dogs. Not only were they agriculturalist, but they also hunted, mined for flint, crafted and bartered axes, and could almost be called early industrialists. The Windmill Hill people had a very strong ties and beliefs in their religion with a great respect for their dead and their ancestors. They have exceptional collective graves, in the form of long burrows, or long manmade piles of dirt, sometimes 400 feet long. Many riches such as food, tools, and pottery were buried with the dead.
The next group to contribute to Stonehenge was the Beaker people; known for the beaker-like pottery they would frequently bury with their dead. These people did not practice the ritual of collective burials, rather single or double burials, and the dead were accompanied by more items used as weapons during the time, such as daggers and battleaxes. These single burials were in the form of round barrows. The Beaker people were well organized, active, and powerful, and also probably more territorial. They practiced commerce with other cultures, and their graves give an impression of there being an aristocracy in the society.
The last major group to put time into the construction of Stonehenge was the Wessex Tribe.
They arrived on Salisbury plain around 1450 B.C., and were involved in building the most prominent part of Stonehenge, the great stone circles. These people were well organized, and probably less aggressive or assertive than their predecessors, while more industrious with the technology they used to farm as well as build the great monuments. The people of Wessex were less concerned with war and centered rather around art, poetry, and trade. Philosophically and scientifically the Wessex were far ahead of the rest of the world, some rival their ingenuity to that of the Ancient Greeks. In the graves of their chieftains, were goods such as daggers, bows, and various other ornaments. Their access to such luxuries can perhaps be attributed to their great international barters who probably traded with people from the Mediterranean Sea area. They built the final phase of Stonehenge, and brought about many cultural changes to the monument such as giving the monument visual magnificence, through artistic designs portraying the afterlife,
It is important to understand the problems and great strife that was encountered during the assembling of Stonehenge. As well as to understand the process the surrounding environment was put through in order to start the great and unsurpassed undertaking. By the time Stonehenge was built, the landscape around the area on Salisbury Plain was rather open with more tilling soil and open prairie land, and less woodland. Underneath the first few feet of soil on Salisbury Plain there was a large layer of hard chalk, which made putting together rudimentary structures somewhat
The first phase of construction for Stonehenge was that of the earth monument, which consisted of a circular bank of dirt with a ditch running along the outside of the bank. There are two breaks in the ditch and bank, forming two entrances, and in addition there are 56 Aubrey Holes, named for John Aubrey, their discoverer, in a circle just inside the earth bank. This first phase, Stonehenge I, built by the Windmill Hill people, took from about 2,950 B.C. to 2,900 B.C.
The second phase of Stonehenge brings on the building a large intricate wooden monument. This stage is backed by evidence of wooden stabilizing poles which are scattered all along the project area. There also seems to have been a roughly octagonal shaped structure at the southern entrance of the earth monument, and a more complex foundation around the northwestern entrance. The Avenue which is made up of a pair of straight, long, and parallel trenches was also said by many to have been part of this second phase of Stonehenge as well. Stonehenge II has been be linked to the Beaker people, approximately between the years 2,900
The third and most architecturally impressive stage of the landmark is that of the stone constructions. The builders of Stonehenge III were the people of the Wessex Tribe. This phase of building spanned from 2,500 B.C. to 1,00 B.C. , it was the longest and most painstaking of the three different phases. Because of its challenge level it was split up into six different sub-phases. First in the sequence was the arrival of the Bluestones, followed by the use of the Sarsen stones. After that the Bluestones were put together in an efficient yet ornamental fashion. Then the Sarsen stones were arranged in a very particular order and then raised by using ropes and thousands of men to pull the 7,000 pound stones to an erect position. This was followed by the cutting of Y and X holes around the perimeter of the Sarsen stones in order to help maintain their
If we look at how heavy these stones are and how little technology was available at the time it is obvious as to why it took so long to raise this beautiful yet technically very simple structure. For instance, the bluestones had to be carried 300 miles from a quarry in the Prescally Mountains back to Salisbury Plain. They were then dragged to a nearby waterway which most likely on the coast near the Bristol channel and through the English riverways to the Stonehenge Avenue by way of ship or more likely floating rafts. They were dragged by putting the stones on rollers and dragging them like pulling something on a ancient style dolly.
Transport of the Sarsen stones were very similar o that of the Bluestones, but their location was much closer. They were only 20 miles away in a quarry in the Marlborough Downs. The path in which they were carried over was relatively clear so they just had to roll them but, with each stone wearing roughly 30 tons each, they used around 4,000 men and it took nearly 15
The Sarsen stones were placed into deep holes in the ground. Then they were joined to their lintels by a mortis and tenon joint. The lintels joined to each other with a tongue and groove joint. Very orlaborate organization skills are needed to coordinate such a large project that involves thousands of men and thousands of years of work. The effort put into constructing this monument is incomparable to construction projects that are done today since we are so far advanced technologically. When all of the construction was at its final stage of completion , the end product was an extraordinary piece of art. There is an outermost circleand bankof 30 of the Sarsen stones, each averaging 13 feet 6 inches tall, and each connected by a lintel stone to each stone on either side. Just inside that circle of Sarsens is a circle of bluestones, smaller stones which are usually not taller than 6 feet. Inside of the bluestone circle is the trilithon horseshoe, or a horseshoe-shaped setting of Sarsens in trilithons, or two Sarsens standing next to each other with one lintel across the top. The open end of the horseshoe faces the northeast. Inside the trilithon horseshoe is a bluestone horseshoe. Inside the bluestone horseshoe, somewhat towards the center, is the altar stone, which might not have been used for that purpose. At the entrance to the monument, the heel stone stands just south of the line that runs down the center of the avenue, and not far off lies the slaughter stone, lying on the ground in the break of the circular bank. There are four station stones just inside the earth bank- one that points north, one that points to the south, and two that together make a line perpendicular to the axis of the avenue. The faces of all of the Sarsen stones were dressed and shaped, and they were mostly given a convex shape to exaggerate the impression of insignificance one gets when looking up at
Being that there is little evidence for what Stonehenge could have been created for, other than the people buried there and what we directly observe about the monument, there have been many hypotheses about its purpose, and many of these hypotheses seem to be appropriate. Among the most accepted of these conjectures is that the stone monument was meant to be a temple, a burial ground, and, seemingly the most apparent of these, a solar/lunar observatory. The main entrance of Stonehenge that has the Avenue’s opening, towards which the entire stone monument is situated, points directly at the sunrise on the summer solstice. When standing in the center of the monument, on the longest day of the year, one can see the sun rise directly over the heel stone. This seems to force a viewer to notice the sunrise on the longest day of the year. The original four “station stones” placed around the circle make many alignments to point to rise and set points of the sun and moon on winter and summer solstices. Interestinglly is that the combination of sun and moon solstice rise and set points could only be collectively arranged in a perfect rectangle at the latitude at which Stonehenge is situated. A few miles north or south and the combination would have to be a parallelogram. In addition to the station stone alignments, each trilithon in the center horseshoe corresponds to certain alignments, as there are two sunset trilithons, a sunrise trilithon, and two for lunar alignments. Not only does this show that the builders and planners of Stonehenge had a great regard for the heavens, but also that they had great knowledge of geometry and science to be able to find exact angle measurements and proportions. It can also be seen that the Aubrey Holes could be used as a system of predicting eclipses. The 56 Aubrey Holes correspond to 3 cycles of the moon’s orbital wobble, these could be used to line up with various solar alignments in Stonehenge to predict when the sun and moon would be at the same point in the sky. By a system of moving three markers around the 56 positions of the Aubrey holes, when all three were in the same spot, an eclipse was to occur. Within places in Stonehenge, such as the Aubrey Holes and the outer ditch, cremation remains of hundreds of people were found. This infers that Stonehenge was used as a primary burial site in the Stone and Bronze Ages. Remarkable is that a great amount of cremations were found on the southeast side of the circle, which is where the moon rises at its most southerly point.
The many cultures of the Neolithic and Bronze ages seemed to have a pre-occupation with death and the afterlife, and consequently took great regard to having the dead buried properly. In addition, since it is not possible to give each member of a society a proper burial in such a small area, the people must have had a hierarchical society in which some individuals had precedence over others for a glorious afterlife. As a place of worship, Stonehenge shows much detail and substance. Many of the celestial alignments put focus on things that are greater and more eternal than human beings, and these things could very well be the basis of the religion of the prehistoric
When seen from above, the lintels on the outer Sarsen circle form a perfect circle that is impeccably level with the ground. Since this cannot be appreciated by people standing on the ground, it seems as if it is meant to be seen by someone above. The fixation with death and the afterlife among the peoples of Salisbury Plain seems to be a religion in itself. Perhaps the sun and moon gods, in being born and dying within their own cycles of rising and setting could aid the soul of the human in being reborn in the afterlife. The strategy for showing their gods of their worth was clearly well thought-out and well planned by the builders and peoples of the Stone
The complexity and intelligence of the peoples of Stonehenge can also be seen in surrounding monuments created by them and their neighbors. Most of the enclosures and round barrows in the vicinity of Stonehenge were created for burial purposes, with one or two people buried within them, usually accompanied by valuables such as daggers, pottery, and in some cases, gold ornaments. These treasures often represent high status or high political position, indicating a structured government and system of beliefs that the cultures of Salisbury Plain possessed. Stonehenge represents the evolving and changing society of prehistoric times that gradually changed into a well-developed society with rulers, priests, and a working and farming class, as well as relations with other cultures from far away with which to engage in trade and associate. The idea that men from the Stone Age were unintelligent, ill-mannered barbarians is far from the truth in the case of Stonehenge. The cultures of Windmill Hill, the Beaker people, and Wessex all thoroughly demonstrate organized systems and communities of the Stone and Bronze Ages. So what this means in terms of what the actual truth is, Mr. Vitaly, is that there will never be a positive answer as to why and to what purpose Stonehenge was built. In my strenuous studies spanning many books as well as many web pages, I found probably over a hundred different theories on Stonehenge. I only printed the more well known theories, but one professor from the University of Connecticut believes that it was made by the risen christ as an entry way for the saints to pass from the Earth to the Heavens.
Bibliography:
Cohen, I.L. The Secret of Stonehenge. Greenvale, NY: New Research Publications, Inc., 1977.
Dimitrakopoulos, Sandra. (2000). Mystic Places: Stonehenge, [Online}. Available HTTP: http://www.exn.ca/mysticplaces/stonehenge.cfm.
Stimulus Materials and Researcher Instructions – Spring, 2020 – Consensus Conformity Study
Stimulus Materials and Researcher Instructions – Spring, 2020 – Consensus / Conformity Study
Instructions: This Spring, 2020, we are going to run a series of studies looking at how participants respond to a cheating scenario. We’ll do this by showing participants a fake Facebook page that contains the user’s confession to cheating followed by different feedback comments from her friends (opposing, supporting, or mixed feedback). The main focus of our study is to see how our participants perceive the cheating based on whether the user’s friends are unanimously supportive, oppositional, or mixed in response to the cheating. Because research suggests that people don’t like to break unanimity, the likelihood is high that participants will conform their own feedback and thoughts about cheating in the same direction as the user’s friends.
1). For your first experimental study, you will play the role of researcher, and you will collect data from three different participants (though you will combine your data with other class members, so your final data set will have nearly 140 people!). There are two phases to this study. In the first phase, you will orally ask participants if they are willing to participate in a research study. In the second phase, participants will complete a five-part survey. In Part One, participants will read the “About” Facebook page for a college student named Abigail Foster, getting some general information about Abigail, looking at a confession that she made about cheating on an exam, and reading the feedback that her friends gave her regarding her cheating. In Part Two, participants will rate Abigail’s behavior. In Part Three, participants will rate how they would respond to Abigail, how they would respond themselves in the same situation, and provide some ratings of their general impressions of Abigail. In Part Four, participants will complete demographic questions. Finally, in Part Five, participants will tell us about the general nature of the feedback Abigail’s friends gave her (our manipulation check in this study). To run this study, use the following steps:
A). Your first task is to approach three different participants (not all at the same time!). They must be people that you do not know, and cannot be taking a psychology research methods class during the Fall, 2019 semester or the Spring, 2020 semester. Please DO NOT complete this study yourself, and use only FIU students or strangers as participants (no family / friends for this study – You will use them in a later replication study toward the end of the summer semester). There are 48 students in our class, so with each student getting data from 3 people, our final sample will be around 140 participants total.
B). Phase I: Informed Consent
1). Informed Consent:
Ask the potential participant if he or she is willing to participate in a study for your research methods class. You will get their informed consent verbally. Tell them:
“Hello, this semester in my psychology research methods class, we are collecting different types of data (demographic information, open-ended questions, scaled questions, etc.) that we will analyze in our statistical lab. I was wondering if you would be willing to participate in my study. The study takes about five to ten minutes. There are no risks to participating, and the main benefit is that I can complete my class assignment. Will you participate?”
An oral Yes or No response is fine. If they say no, thank them and find a different participant. If they say yes, move to the next step (Phase II – Questionnaire).
C). Phase II: “Questionnaire”
1). General Instructions
After getting participant’s oral informed consent, randomly give them ONE of the three “Research Study – Florida International University – Spring, 2020” documents. These documents contain our primary independent and dependent variables for the study. One third of our research participants will be in the “Support” consensus condition, one third will be in the “Oppose” consensus condition, and one third will be in the “Mixed” condition. Participants should not know what condition they are in.
Ask participants to follow the instructions at the top of the questionnaire. Tell them to read EVERYTHING on the Facebook page, as they will answer questions about it later and will need to do so through memory. They can move through the five “Parts” in this survey at their own pace. Make sure they complete all questionnaire parts (though they can leave some demographic questions blank if they do not want to provide the details).
2). Questionnaire
In Part I, participants look at the Facebook “About” page for a college student named Abigail Foster. The page contains a picture masthead profile picture of Abigail, a generic “About” section (which contains basic information About Abigail), fake advertisements, a “Friends” list with selfies of six friends, and a long paragraph that Abigail posted earlier that day. This paragraph is very important, as it discusses an incident in which Abigail accidentally received an exam answer key during an exam and used it to get the best grade in the course (raising the curve and potentially hurting the scores of other test-takers). She feels bad about it, and wants some help from her friends. Please note that EVERYTHING on the Facebook page up to this point is identical across all three conditions (but don’t tell participants that!). So what differs? The comments from her friends! You will notice that in one survey, the comments universally support her cheating. In another survey, the comments universally oppose her cheating. The comments on the third survey are more mixed. That is …
In the “Support” consensus condition, there are eight comments from Abigail’s friends, which universally support her cheating. These include comments like, “Wow, Abigail, sounds like you really lucked out there. Take the grade. You “earned” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – your big break! Take the grade.”
In the “Oppose” consensus condition, there are eight comments from Abigail’s friends, which universally oppose her cheating. These include comments like, “Wow, Abigail, though it sounds like you really lucked out there, you can’t take the grade. You didn’t really “earn” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – but your integrity! Don’t take the grade.”
In the “Mixed” no consensus condition, there are once again eight comments from Abigail’s friends, but these are more mixed (with some of the same oppose comments from the “Oppose” condition and some of the same support comments from the “Support” conditions intermixed). Thus there is no real consensus in this condition
A quick note for you (the researcher): If you look at the bottom of the survey in the footer on the second survey page, you will see one of the following: “S”, “O”, or “M”, which relate to the three study conditions – That is, S is for “Support”, O is for “Oppose”, and M is for “Mixed”. It’s a nice shorthand so you can tell which survey the participant completed (but this is not something you need to report in your papers – it’s just a handy reference for you as you collect data)
In Part II, participants will rate their impressions of Abigail Foster’s behavior (the Facebook user). Here, participants are asked to agree or disagree with seven statements about Abigail, with all seven using an interval scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 6 (Strongly Agree). These statements include, “Abigail’s behavior was wrong”, Abigail’s behavior was understandable”, “Abigail’s behavior was reasonable”, “Abigail’s behavior was unethical”, “Abigail’s behavior was immoral”, “Abigail’s behavior was appropriate”, and “Abigail’s behavior was unacceptable.” Although you can look at any (or all) of these seven statements when you write Paper II (which focuses on the methods and results for this study), you only need to focus on one of them in your later analyses. You’ll note that many of them are similar (terms like “wrong”, “immoral”, “unethical”, and “unacceptable” are similar, and will produce similar ratings). We expect participant ratings to differ depending on their condition. That is, participants will probably rate Abigail’s behavior as more wrong, immoral, unethical, and unacceptable (and less understandable, reasonable, and appropriate) in the “Oppose Consensus” condition than in the “Support Consensus” condition, with those in the “Mixed Consensus” condition falling closer to the center of the rating scales. That is, participant responses will conform to the consensus of Abigail’s friends.
In Part III, participants will rate several statements about what advice they would give Abigail, how they would respond in the same situation, and provide ratings of their general impressions of Abigail. Statements 1, 2, and 3 relate to the advice they would give Abigail (“I would advise Abigail to keep silent”, “I would try to comfort Abigail”, and “I would give Abigail the same advice that her friends gave her”). We expect once again that participant ratings will differ depending on their condition, with “Oppose” consensus participants less likely to endorse keeping silent or comforting Abigail than “Support” consensus participants. The third question, though, is very interesting. If conformity is really working in our study, then both “Support” consensus and “Oppose” consensus participants should strongly agree with statement 3! That is, we shouldn’t see differences between those conditions. Statements 4 and 5 are based on how the participant would respond in the same situation. Given social desirability biases, participants will most likely respond in a socially desirable way (say they would not keep silent). The remaining items in statements six through twelve are based on the warmth/competency scales developed by Fiske. We will probably ignore these in our own analyses, but it might be interesting to see how participants rate Abigail in terms of her personality traits.
In Part IV, participants will complete demographic questions. Most of these items are easy to complete without violating participant’s privacy, but they will know they can leave blank any question(s) they feel uncomfortable answering.
In Part V, participants will tell us whether the feedback Abigail received from her friends tended to support her behavior, oppose her behavior, or was more mixed. Unlike the statements in Parts II and III (which used interval scales, allowing us to analyze them with t-Tests or ANOVAs), the nominal scale used in Part V (three answer options in no particular order) only permit us to use a chi square analysis. We’ll discuss those more as we get to Paper Two.
D). Once participants have completed the questionnaire, debrief them regarding the study. That is, tell them about Conformity / Consensus and your main hypothesis. Read them the following:
“Thank you for participating. The purpose of this study is to determine if Facebook feedback that seems to support or oppose cheating impacts how participants perceived that cheating. That is, will Facebook feedback that appears to support (versus oppose) a friend who cheated on an exam influence how participants perceive that cheating? To study this possibility, participants all read the same cheating scenario in which a girl (Abigail) cheated on an exam by using an answer key the professor mistakenly gave her. When seeking advice from her friends, he friends either gave her unanimously supportive feedback (“Wow, Abigail, sounds like you really lucked out there. Take the grade. You “earned” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – your big break! Take the grade.”), unanimously oppositional feedback (“Wow, Abigail, though it sounds like you really lucked out there, you can’t take the grade. You didn’t really “earn” it!” and “Listen, it’s not like you intended to cheat going into the exam. The prof should have checked to make sure he was handing out only blank exams. His mistake – but your integrity! Don’t take the grade.”), or mixed feedback. The word “unanimous” is important here. When the feedback is unanimous (either in support of the user or opposing her), it is harder to voice a contrary opinion. When feedback is mixed, it is easier to voice a true opinion.
In general, we predict that participants who read unanimously supportive feedback will rate the Facebook user’s conduct as more acceptable than participants who read unanimously oppositional feedback, with those who read mixed feedback falling between these extremes.
More specifically, participants in the unanimously supportive condition will more strongly agree with supportive survey statements (“Abigail’s behavior was understandable, “Abigail’s behavior was reasonable”, “Abigail’s behavior was appropriate”, “I would advise Abigail to keep silent”, and “I would try to comfort Abigail”) and more strongly disagree with oppositional survey statements (“Abigail’s behavior was wrong”, “Abigail’s behavior was unethical”, “Abigail’s behavior was immoral”, and “Abigail’s behavior was unacceptable”) compared to participants in the unanimously oppositional condition, with participants in the mixed condition falling between these extremes. However, participants in both the unanimously supportive and unanimously oppositional conditions will strongly agree that they would give Abigail the same advice that her friends gave her.**
We will test these hypotheses in our methods course this semester. Thank you for participating!
**Methods Students: Note that the underlined paragraphs above will be helpful when you write Paper I! In fact, you can use that underlined paragraphs in your first paper if you like (just copy and paste it into your hypotheses). However, the predictions ARE NOT INCLUDED in your minimum page count. That is, you can copy/paste the predictions, but they do not count in the page minimum! Also note that in the last sentence in this paragraph, I highlighted eight different dependent variables (understandable, reasonable, wrong, etc.). Since you are not required to analyze every dependent variable in Part III of your survey, feel free to edit this last paragraph to include ONLY the two dependent variables that you actually analyzed (this applies mostly to Paper II when you figure out which DVs you want to focus on in your Results Section analysis. There is no point in making predictions about dependent variables you did not actually analyze, so just focus on the two dependent variable most relevant to your own study in your predictions.)
2). Hold onto the completed questionnaires, as you will use them in an upcoming lab. You will enter data into SPSS and analyze it during your lab. Important note: Each student researcher is responsible for collecting data from three participants (one participant for each study condition – OC, SC and MC). However, we will combine survey data from ALL students in your lab section, so your final sample will include at least 140 or so participants. In your papers (especially Paper II), you will use this total set of research participants (at least 140), NOT just the three that you collected yourself. Don’t even discuss “Three participants”, as that is not correct. Discuss ALL 140 participants in your papers
3). One last note: Pay close attention to these instructions! You can use them as the basis for Paper II later this semester when you discuss your methods section. That being said, these instructions are too long for a methods section, and includes information you will need to omit for Paper II. When writing that paper, make sure to only report the important aspects (what you actually did in the study). Write about what you actually did in the study!