Our IAT examined the difference between comfort levels of students with male versus female faculty. We hypothesized that students would feel more comfortable with female faculty. We began by asking participants to approach three faculty members that they were not close to and address them by their first names, and then rate their level of comfort on a scale of 0-100 with 0 being very uncomfortable and 100 being very comfortable. These scores became our criterion measure. Our explicit measure was a survey asking participants their attitudes about male and female faculty.
Our IAT data revealed that there was a difference in the comfort levels of participants with male versus female faculty (p=.116, M=67.46). This was an impressive finding considering the fact that there were only seven participants, one being an extreme outlier (-102). Our correlation between the IAT and the criterion measure was .519 and our p-value was approaching significance (p=.233). The correlation between the explicit and criterion measures was .08, but our p-value was very high (p=.865). These results indicate that the IAT was better at predicting behavior than the explicit measure.
The outlier we had was extreme in both the IAT and the criterion (but not the explicit), which may have changed the outcome of our statistics, but did remain consistent with our IAT better predicting behavior.
According to the Poehlman and Uhlmann article, the IAT was better at predicting behavior regarding culturally sensitive issues than explicit measures. Gender differences, especially in a professional setting, are included in this group of issues. Our findings support this idea.
We did feel that there were some methodological problems during this experiment. One participant did not complete the criterion measure, two participants only chose one gender, and one participant only chose two faculty members. This made the criterion difficult to score and may have affected our results.
Katy Bissell
Laura Serafin
Jessie Harpel
Ritwik Niyogi
posted by Psych 430 @ 4:12 PM
5 Comments:
I won't comment extensively on these posts until the other groups do. But I will say that a p value of .233 should not be characterized as "approaching significance."
Our group was in consensus that we had very high levels of discomfort with regards to the critereon variable due to the way we were brought up, in that we thought it was very disrespectful to call Profs by their first names. Also, other key factors that played into the level of discomfort could be the Prof's personality (whether he/she was generally approachable or not) and our own personalities (whether subjects are introverted or extroverted), etc. The critereon measure was not effective in predicting people's attitudes towards female vs. male faculty, becuase it is equally disrespectful to address both genders by their first names. Also, since subjects were not instructed to choose members from each gender, some subjects only chose male faculty members (as noted in this group's explanation). Perhaps the study would have yielded stonger results if they had made more specifications in how the experiment was to be carried out.
Another limitation of the study could have been the length and types of words in the IAT. Some of the words were long/complicated, which could have added to the time it took to process them. Also, some of the words looked similar, which could have also caused a delay in response time.
-Amanda, Sarah, Allen, and Suhani
We just wanted to address Prof. Abrams comment - We realize that .233 is nowhere close to .05 and we should not have addressed this as "approaching significance". However, we wanted to note that given the circumstances of the study (i.e. small number of participants) that even with a higher p-value, we believe this correlation is worth exploring.
Jessie
Laura
Katy
Rit
One more thing - we just wanted to note that although the participants may have explicitly felt that it was equally disrespectful to address male and female professors by their first names, this is not what your IAT scores OR your criterion measures showed.
We think it's great how strong their measure turned out to work. However, the criterion measure didn't seem to work, and we think it's partly because of the social mores (as we talked about) and also personality. We beleive many people have some social anxiety problems, so doing something like this would make people nervous.
-Andy, Dave, Meghan, Lucia
Post a Comment
<< Home