Research Strategies

Case Studies: Educating the Gifted Adolescent

By Jan Slater, Director, Early Entrance Program, California State University, Los Angeles

The young student and her parents arrived 15 minutes early for the interview. The father carried an inch-thick folder of the awards their daughter Grace had received. This was the opportunity they had been looking for.

After brief introductions, Mr. Xonophon began speaking almost immediately. “Grace hasn’t been challenged at school for the last two years, yet they refuse to move her to the next grade. The gifted program is just a lot of busywork. She’s so bored she no longer enjoys school.”

“Sometimes she comes home in tears,” Mrs. Xonophon urged. “She is very unhappy now. Can she enter your program at the university?”

Grace sat almost motionless, looking from parent to parent as they revealed her story. Occasionally she cast an anxious glance at the counselor. When asked how she felt about school, Grace simply nodded her answers.

Somewhat concerned about the young girl’s passivity, the counselor gently questioned Grace, hoping she would reveal something of her own personality. The parents, however, continued to answer most of the questions themselves.

Grace’s test scores had been high. In fact, they were third highest among the 650 gifted middle school students last tested. She received straight As in school. On the strength of her academic performance, the counselor conditionally admitted the 13-year-old girl to the Early Entrance Program, a program of radically accelerated education for the precociously gifted. The counselor hoped that she would be able to handle the demands of college classes and eventually show motivation of her own.

The first 10-week quarter went well enough. Grace attended two courses: biology and cultural anthropology. She worked diligently at her classes and appeared each week for her meetings with the program director. Her parents drove her to and from the university each day. She had little free time on campus. Naturally, she developed no more than a passing acquaintance with the other students in the program. She received an A and a B; these grades qualified her for permanent status in the program. She was 13 and a full-time student in college.

At the review meeting with the family, Grace managed to express, although shyly, her desire to remain in the program. She apologized for the B in anthropology. Her father assured the counselor that she would do better now that she understood what college work was like. She planned her courses with her parents and the counselor. The counselor made sure that her three classes would put her on campus four days a week and give her several hours between classes. It was critical for Grace to achieve some independence from her parents and begin to relate to her peers in the program.

This picture of Grace is a case study of a gifted adolescent. A case study gives an in-depth description of an individual. Usually individuals selected for a case study are atypical in some way. The case study may describe the person’s life circumstances, symptoms or special abilities, or the success (or failure) of a treatment program. The writings of Sigmund Freud contain many case studies drawn from his clinical work. Erik Erikson used case studies to give us psychological profiles of well-known historical figures such as Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi. A case study of a woman suffering from a multiple-personality disorder became the basis of the film The Three Faces of Eve.

Case studies are useful because they provide information about conditions that are so unusual they would not otherwise be available for study. Like other forms of naturalistic observation, they provide rich sources for hypotheses that can be checked against other sources of data. They also share the disadvantage of not allowing the investigator to disentangle cause from effect or otherwise isolate the conditions presumed to be responsible for the interesting behavior being described. That type of analysis must await the application of other research procedures. Let’s return to the gifted adolescent in our case study and see how successful she has been.

With her first year of college behind her, Grace had developed in measurable ways. At the weekly meetings with the counselor, she admitted that her father had dominated much of her life and that she wished to be free of her parents’ ambitions for her. She managed more As and Bs, but became more and more self-critical each time she achieved less than she expected. Like many gifted students, Grace’s standards for herself were extremely high. By the end of that first year, both motivation and judgment were more hers than her parents. The social aspect of Grace’s personality also began to flower. Toward the middle of the first year, she made two friends in the program. The three girls were within a year of each other in age and class level, yet very different in personality. The oldest, a 14-year-old college sophomore, was studious, determined, and rather flatly assertive. Nina provided a standard by which many of the students could measure their achievement. Lindy, on the other hand, was quick and socially vigilant, often sacrificing achievement to amusement and exploration. She easily got Bs and seemed satisfied for the time being. Although Grace remained the shyest, she began to develop a wry sense of humor. Her style of dress evolved from the little girl dresses she originally appeared in to the studied messiness that was standard for adolescents. A little rebellion began to surface.

But only a little. In the following two years, Grace occasionally resisted her parents’ and even the counselor’s advice, often making very good decisions for herself. She maintained her original friendships and slowly added new ones. Her academic work grew stronger as she matured, yet her standards were never compromised. She planned to enter medical school and had her sights on the best in the country.

Today, Grace is 16 and a junior in college. She is studying for the MCAT, the exam that will play a large part in determining where she will be accepted for medical school. She has progressed from a nearly speechless girl to a quietly confident young woman. Her first friends, Nina and Lindy, have also progressed in their own ways. Nina is planning for her first year in law school. Lindy thinks she might take another year to finish her major in biology, with minors in chemistry and music.

 

Source:

The 27 gifted adolescents in the 1991 Early Entrance Program at California State University, Los Angeles; compiled by Jan Slater, Director. In P. C. Cozby. (1997). Methods in behavioral research (6th ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

Factorial Designs: Interpreting Ambiguous Situations

Dylan was the picture of cool as he sat facing the interviewer, one arm casually thrown over the back of the chair and his long legs stretched out in front of him. Despite his demeanor, he felt on edge. The interviewer had suggested that it might be helpful to have a friend present during the interview and had asked Dylan to choose someone from his class. A research assistant had been sent to bring his friend to the interview. As Dylan looked up, the assistant appeared in the doorway and said that his friend wasn’t coming. “Some friend,” thought Dylan, reacting with anger to what he perceived as an intentional slight.

Not all adolescents would react as Dylan did.

Some would simply assume their friends would have wanted to come if they could but weren’t able to leave the class. What might account for differences among adolescents in the way ambiguous social situations such as this are perceived? And how might such differences affect them and their friendships?

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969, 1980) proposes that individuals form working models of relationships, in the form of expectancies, based on their earliest experiences of acceptance or rejection. These expectancies, in the case of rejection, promote a readiness to perceive the actions of others negatively, whereas expectancies of acceptance promote more charitable interpretations. Geraldine Downey, Amy Lebolt, Claudia Rincon, and Antonio Freitas (1998) were interested in whether adolescents who defensively expect to be rejected are more likely than others to be upset by ambiguous situations such as the one described above and whether their reactions actually create problems with friends.

On the basis of a rejection sensitivity questionnaire, the researchers distinguished two groups of early adolescents (mean age = 12.2 years): those who were high in expectations of rejection and those who were low in rejection expectations. Adolescents from these two groups were randomly assigned to either an experimental or a control condition that differed in how ambiguous the rejection was. Those in the experimental condition were told their friend would not join them but were given no explanation for the friend’s refusal. Those in the control condition were also told their friend would not join them but were informed this was because the teacher would not allow their friend to leave. After hearing that their friend would not join them, all adolescents completed measure indicating how much distress they felt.

These investigators used a factorial design that included two variables: rejection sensitivity (high or low) and ambiguity of the rejection (experimental or control). In a factorial design, two or more independent variables, or factors, are completely crossed so that each level of one variable is combined with each level of all the other variables. Factorial designs provide information about the effect of each independent variable alone, called a main effect, and information about the effect of a variable when another variable is present, called an interaction.

An interaction exists when the effect of a variable changes when a second variable is present. We might find, for instance, that neither type of adolescent would experience much distress under the low ambiguity condition (control) but that those with high rejection expectations would experience more distress than those with low expectations when the reason for the refusal was ambiguous (experimental). The existence of an interaction means that we must qualify what we say about a variable. Are adolescents with high rejection expectations more likely than those with low expectations to be distressed by a friend’s refusal to join them? It depends. If they are given no reason for the refusal, then they are. But if they are told why, then they are not.

Downey and her associates found the interaction they had expected (see Figure 1 in the source paper). Adolescents with high rejection expectations experienced more distress only in the ambiguous situation, in which they presumably interpreted the refusal as intentionally hostile. A longitudinal follow-up one year later revealed that differences in rejection sensitivity predicted the amount of conflict adolescents experienced with peers and the extent to which they had difficulties with their teachers. Thus, adolescents who expected to be rejected were more likely to perceive situations as instances of rejection and to react defensively and angrily, leading to interpersonal difficulties with both their friends and their teachers.

 

Source

G. Downey, A. Lebolt, C. Rincon, & A. L. Freitas. (1998). Rejection sensitivity and children’s interpersonal difficulties. Child Development, 69: 1074–1091.

Matched-Subjects Design: Sexual Orientation of Children Raised in Lesbian Families

How much, if at all, do parents influence the sexual orientation of their children? How likely is it that a child’s sexual orientation will be affected by observing the gender roles of parents? Are sexual preferences learned through exposure to parents who model various behaviors? Are they acquired through a process of identifying with the same-sex parent? Or do sexual preferences reflect, in large measure, a roll of the genetic dice?

Research with gay men with either monozygotic or dizygotic twin brothers (Bailey & Pillard, 1991), and with lesbian women with twin sisters (Bailey, Pillard, Neale, & Agyei, 1993), finds that monozygotic twins are significantly more likely to also be homosexual themselves than are dizygotic twins. This finding indicates a genetic link to homosexuality in that monozygotic twins have identical genetic makeups, developing as they do from the same fertilized ovum, whereas dizygotic twins develop from two separate ova and are no more similar genetically than any other two siblings. One’s genetic makeup, then, can be argued to significantly influence one’s sexual orientation.

Social-cognitive theory, on the other hand, argues that modeling of gender roles by the same-sex parent, along with the parents’ differential reinforcement of appropriately masculine or feminine behaviors, are important determinants of gender development. Accordingly, family environment, as provided by the sexual orientation of parents, should be an important influence on the sexual orientation of children.

Previous research on the development of sexual orientation in children has been limited to heterosexual families. Critical comparisons of the sexual preferences of adult children raised by homosexual versus heterosexual parents have been lacking. Susan Golombok and Fiona Tasker (1996) corrected this deficiency by investigating the sexual preferences of children raised in lesbian families and by comparing these with the preferences of children raised in heterosexual families.

Golombok and Tasker contacted 27 lesbian mothers and 27 heterosexual mothers when their children were approximately 9 years old. The children were contacted again 14 years later, when they were approximately 23 years old, to determine the influence of being raised by a lesbian mother. Simple? Yes, as long as one controls for other variables that might relate to sexual orientation, such as the presence or absence of a father in the home, mother’s age, and social class. Golombok and Tasker made sure that children in each of the two types of families were raised in homes in which the fathers were absent, the homes differing only in the sexual orientation of their mothers. Thus the lesbian mothers were matched with control mothers who differed only in sexual orientation. (As one might expect, most of these mothers had at least one relationship [heterosexual] during the time the children were living at home, just as most of the lesbian mothers had at least one lesbian relationship.)

To match subjects along some variable, one first needs to rank the subjects in each sample according to the matching variable—say, social class—and then draw pairs of subjects from the two samples that are from the same or approximately the same income bracket. Using this procedure, one can be sure that the two groups will be equivalent regarding the matching variable. If social class is related to sexual orientation, it will be equated for the two groups. Any differences between groups in sexual orientation cannot be due to social class.

Matching carries an additional advantage: It reduces the amount of unexplained variability in the groups. This variability is termed random error. By reducing random error, one can more easily see the effects of the variable of interest. Another way of describing this advantage is to say that matched designs are more sensitive than those in which each subject is randomly assigned. The sensitivity of a design refers to its ability to detect a difference due to the treatment variable if such a difference exists.

Matching sounds like such a good idea that one has to wonder why investigators don’t use this method all the time. Yet, like other procedures, it has its disadvantages. The most serious drawback is a statistical one concerning the degrees of freedom used when determining the significance of the tests that evaluate the research outcome.

In designs that do not match subjects, the degrees of freedom reflect the number of subjects; in matched-subjects designs, they reflect the number of pairs. Matching cuts the degrees of freedom in half. This means that one must obtain a larger difference for it to reach statistical significance. The irony to this disadvantage is that matching is most advantageous when one is using few subjects, because it increases the sensitivity of the design. But this is the very condition under which one can least afford to lose degrees of freedom. Before one matches, one needs to be sure that the matching variable is highly correlated with the measure one is using. Only in this way will it effectively reduce unexplained variability and pay for the loss in degrees of freedom.

Matched designs are slightly more time consuming to conduct than are those involving simple random assignment of subjects. One must first administer the matching variable, then rank subjects before they can be assigned to conditions. Extra expense may also be involved. A more serious disadvantage than either of these is the threat to external validity that occurs when subjects who can’t be matched must be discarded. Any loss of subjects can affect the representativeness of the sample and the ability to generalize to the population from which it was drawn.

What does Golombok and Tasker’s matched design tell us about the influence of lesbian mothers on the sexual orientation of their children? Although children from lesbian families more frequently explored same-sex relationships, by far most of the children of lesbian families identified themselves as heterosexual.

 

Sources:

J. M. Bailey & R. C. Pillard. (1991). A genetic study of male sexual orientation. Archives of General Psychiatry, 48: 1089–1096.

J. M. Bailey, R. C. Pillard, M. C. Neale, & Y. Agyei. (1993). Heritable factors influence sexual orientation in women. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50: 217–223.

S. Golombok & F. Tasker. (1996). Do parents influence the sexual orientation of their children? Findings from a longitudinal study of lesbian families. Developmental Psychology, 32: 3–11.

Path Analysis: Too Young for Intimacy?

Shelly spends all her time with friends—if not with them at school, then on the phone. Shrieks of laughter and silent smiles punctuate their conversations. It’s clear who’s “in” and who’s not when they’re with others. Shelly is 16. Her life revolves around her friends.

Yet some experts would question how close Shelly really is to her friends. These developmentalists argue that adolescents can form intimate relationships only after they have established a stable identity—a task several years beyond this 16-year-old. Erik Erikson assumes that adolescents must resolve the psychosocial crisis of identity before they can become intimate with others—that is, that intimacy is contingent on identity. Other theorists, such as Carol Gilligan and Ruthellen Josselson, argue that Erikson’s developmental model fits the experience of males better than that of females. These theorists note that females’ interpersonal skills prepare them to define themselves through their relationships with others—that is, that intimacy contributes to identity. Is the connection between identity and intimacy different for adolescent males and females? How might we tell?

Couldn’t we simply measure identity achievement and intimacy in a group of adolescents and see whether those who have a better sense of themselves also have closer relationships with others? Let’s say we do and discover that our assumption was correct. Does this finding support Erikson? Gilligan and Josselson? Actually, we have no way of knowing. There is no way to tell from this single correlation which factor is responsible for the other.

Would it help to separate the adolescents by sex and look at the degree to which the two measures are correlated for each? Not really. Even if we found a stronger relationship for one group than the other, we still would not know for that group which quality contributed to, or caused, the other—that is, whether identity is necessary for intimacy to develop or whether intimacy contributes to the development of identity. All we would know is that adolescents who are high in one attribute are also high in the other, and vice versa.

Path analysis is a statistical procedure that allows developmentalists to infer the direction, or path, of an effect from correlational data. To use this procedure, one must obtain measures for the same variables on more than one occasion. Because causes precede their effects, we need this time difference to trace the direction of the relationship. But how is this procedure any better than a single correlation? We’re still measuring both factors at the same time, just doing it twice instead of once.

That’s true. However, because causes precede their effects, we can look for differences in the strength of relationships that differ only in which factor precedes the other. If Factor A causes Factor B, these factors should be most strongly correlated when measurements for A precede those for B, that is, between Factor A at Time 1 and Factor B at Time 2. The opposite correlation (Time 1 measures of Factor B with Time 2 measures of Factor A) should be relatively weak. The figure shows these correlations as diagonals stretching from Time 1 (T1) measures at the top to Time 2 (T2) measures at the bottom.

But let’s get back to Shelly. Are her friendships likely to be as intimate as they seem, or is their closeness illusory, awaiting further identity development?

Patricia Dyk and Gerald Adams (1990) conducted the study we have been describing (except their subjects were older than Shelly). These investigators found no simple gender difference in the relationship between identity and intimacy: Identity predicts intimacy for both sexes. However, when factors such as gender typing and empathy are taken into account, different patterns emerge for females and males. In males, and in females high in masculinity, identity predicts intimacy. In highly feminine females the association between identity and intimacy is more fused, suggesting that intimacy and identity develop together as Gilligan and Josselson also suggest. Some of these relationships appear in the figure in the source paper.

 

Source

P. H. Dyk & G. R. Adams. (1990). Identity and intimacy: An initial investigation of three theoretical models using cross-lag panel correlations. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 19: 91–110.

Research Issues

Coding Descriptive Responses: Gender Differences in Beliefs about Sexual Desire

What causes sexual desire? Is desire aroused by the characteristics of the person one is with, such as a good body or a dynamic personality? Might it be the situation one finds oneself in, such as being alone with a date in a parked car? Or does it have more to do with oneself, apart from one’s date or partner? Do males and females even attribute desire to the same causes? When it comes to beliefs as to what fans the fires of desire, we are just beginning to get answers to some very basic questions. Social scientists have put most of their energy into defining sexual desire, spending relatively little time exploring people’s beliefs about what causes it. Yet beliefs are closely tied to what people do, and knowing their beliefs brings us one step closer to predicting their behavior. So what do people think are the causes of sexual desire?

Pamela Regan and Ellen Berscheid (1995) asked college students to describe, in their own words, what causes sexual desire in men and women. This approach involves the use of free-response data or descriptive data. When researchers begin to investigate an area in which relatively little is known, they will frequently simply observe what people do in natural settings, or, when this is impossible given the sensitive nature of the behavior, they will listen to what people have to tell them. Open-ended questions such as those used by Regan and Berscheid are useful when one wants to know what people are thinking (Cozby, 1997). Another advantage to descriptive responses is that they generate a rich source of data, useful in formulating future research questions. An additional advantage is the increased external validity of the research, or the likelihood that the answers one gets are representative of the way people actually think.

There are disadvantages to the use of descriptive free responses as well. Perhaps the most formidable of these is the need to code, or classify, specific answers into broader classes of answers. Instead of attempting to work with everything people say, for instance, one looks at categories of answers. This approach makes it easier to detect relationships. Patterns emerge showing the frequency of different types of answers for different people, such as those given by females versus males. How does one arrive at the codes to be used in analyzing descriptive responses? One might decide in advance to look for certain types of answers, given what other investigators have found. One might also look at the answers that are given by a sample of the respondents, grouping specific answers into larger categories based on similarities in their meaning. Regan and Berscheid had two independent raters code each of the response protocols; each rater was ignorant of the sex of the respondent whose answers they read. The use of more than one coder makes it possible to determine the reliability with which answers are coded, or the degree to which the two raters working independently of each other agree in their coding.

The use of free-response or descriptive data is a time-intensive procedure. Raters must be trained to identify responses accurately, and this takes time. The actual scoring of the data also takes more time. In a sense, one enters a stream of behavior with a net—ready to catch (code) certain specimens of interest—but there is little way of speeding up the rate at which the behaviors flow by.

Do college students believe the causes of sexual desire differ for males and females? The answer is a clear yes. Sexual desire in males was believed to be caused by erotic factors, such as looking at a woman with a sexy body, more than by romantic ones, whereas desire in females was thought to be caused more by romantic factors, such as love or intimacy. Significant numbers of students also attributed sexual desire in males simply to their being male, or to their maleness. Conversely, none of them considered femaleness to be a cause of sexual desire in women. Interestingly, in matters romantic, as is so often the case, the sexes often get their signals crossed. For instance, males—but not females—believed that power and status made a male sexually desirable. On the other hand, females—but not males—believed that femininity made a female sexually desirable. Adolescents and young adults spend hours cultivating the right image. All too often, this image fits their own perception of sexual desire but not that of their partner.

 

Source

P. C. Regan & E. Berscheid. (1995). Gender differences in beliefs about the causes of male and female sexual desire. Personal Relationships, 2: 345–358.

Confidentiality: Troubled Relationships—“You Sound Just Like Your Mother!”

“There you go again, just like your mother,” he shouted, “always changing the subject when things get hot.”

“And what if I do,” she objected. “Mom and Dad have been married for 19 years—I could do a lot worse.”

“And fighting for 18 of them—probably because he never gets a chance to finish a sentence. She keeps changing the subject before he can make his point.”

“That’s a cheap shot! Maybe we should stop seeing each other until this blows over.”

“There you go again. Do you think that not seeing each other is going to settle anything? C’mon, stop avoiding things and talk to me.”

Does this teenager fight the way her parents do? Do we inherit patterns of coping from our parents, passing them on from one generation to the next along with the shape of our noses and the color of our eyes? Do parents who deal with conflicts by avoiding them, for instance, have adolescents who use the same approach with their boyfriends or girlfriends? How might we find out?

This is a sensitive area of research. To obtain data, investigators must ask adolescents to answer difficult questions about their own and their parents’ relationships. Often the answers aren’t pretty: petty quarrels, verbal aggression, family violence, failed relationships. These are matters most of us would like to forget, and nearly all of us, if we do tell others, want to be sure the information will be held in confidence. How do investigators treat issues of confidentiality? More generally, what ethical considerations guide their treatment of subjects?

The American Psychological Association, like most professional organizations, provides guidelines governing the ethical conduct of research with human subjects. The overriding concern is to respect the dignity and welfare of those who participate in the research. Other considerations follow from this concern. Subjects are informed, for instance, that their participation is voluntary and that they are free to leave at any time. They are also assured that their answers will be held in confidence.

How can an investigator keep answers confidential and still make public the findings of the research? The key to this problem is anonymity. Investigators code the information subjects give them to prevent the identification of individuals. A common procedure gives subjects numbers to use instead of their names. If an investigator anticipates the need to disclose information, she or he must inform subjects in advance so that they can decide whether to participate under those conditions.

What conditions might cause an investigator to disclose confidential information? Information suggesting that a subject may be dangerous to himself or herself or to others is sufficient cause to violate confidentiality. Threatened suicide or attacks against others are examples. In other instances, investigators may be forced by the courts to reveal information concerning illegal activities. Research on gangs or delinquent activities serves as an example.

Barclay Martin (1990) looked for similarities in the ways adolescents and their parents resolve conflict. Late adolescents responded to questionnaires on the frequency of overt conflict between their parents, on the ways their parents were most likely to resolve conflicts, and on the way they resolved conflicts with their own boyfriend or girlfriend. Martin protected his subjects’ confidentiality by assigning each subject a code number to use instead of a name.

As expected, Martin found that conflict styles are similar across generations, especially when avoidant styles are used. Martin suggests that because the latter approaches do not deal with conflicts directly, needs and feelings will persist. Also, adolescents don’t have the chance to learn the skills that will enable them to cope with conflicts when they arise in their own relationships.

Martin also suggests that adolescents may select partners who are similar to their parents in the way they resolve conflicts—for example, those who also use avoidant styles—either because this style is familiar and comfortable or for deeper psychodynamic reasons. In either case, they are more likely as a couple to perpetuate the difficulties in the relationship experienced by their parents than if they were to select a partner who approached conflict more directly.

 

Source

B. Martin. (1990). The transmission of relationship difficulties from one generation to the next. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 19: 181–199.

The Dependent Variable: When Is a Stereotype Simply a Good Guess, and When Is It More?

We all know that it’s wrong to react to others on the basis of stereotypes. Yet how often do we do so? Stereotypes lead us to expect one type of behavior or another in individuals, based simply on their group membership. Adolescents live in a world of well-defined social groups, each of which is associated with characteristic behaviors. “Jocks,” for instance, are thought of as noisy and rowdy, “preppies” as well-to-do and college bound, and “techies” as spending more time with their computers than with peers. How likely are adolescents to make judgments about the behavior of other adolescents, in the absence of any other information, based on stereotypes such as these?

Stacy Horn, Melanie Killen, and Charles Stangor (1999) wanted to know as well. These investigators were interested in the way high school students would evaluate the appropriateness of punishing other students, in the absence of supporting evidence, when the actions of which they were accused were either consistent or inconsistent with stereotypes for their groups. Would adolescents’ decision making, in other words, be affected by commonly held stereotypes about members of other groups?

Stacy Horn and her associates asked ninth-graders to read a scenario in which some students had too much to drink at a dance and committed an act of vandalism. The students subsequently were told by the student council that they must pay for the damages despite the absence of evidence indicating they were responsible. The students were described either as “jocks” (football players) or as “techies” (computer club members), and the vandalism they committed was either damaging the sound equipment at the party or breaking into the school computer system. Thus, the action could be consistent with students’ stereotypes (e.g., computer club members who broke into the computer system) or inconsistent (e.g., football players who broke into the computer system). After reading the scenario, students were asked to evaluate the action of the student council, to give the reasons on which they based their evaluation, and then to indicate whether they believed the student council’s behavior was justified.

Why did these investigators use more than one measure of stereotyping? If the measures don’t all show the same relationships, how are we to evaluate which one is more accurate? The answer is that different measures pick up different aspects of behavior. Three criteria distinguish accurate measures: reliability, validity, and sensitivity.

The first consideration with any measure of behavior, or dependent variable, is its reliability: It should give you the same value each time you use it. If a student takes an intelligence test, for instance, and retakes it in three weeks, one expects the score to be about the same on both occasions. Differences in IQ from one testing to the next reflect factors other than intelligence—that is, error. Reliable measures have little error. Second, measures must have validity: They must measure what they are designed to measure. Some of the very first intelligence tests were highly reliable but not very valid. Some, for instance, measured how rapidly people could tap their fingers, something that can be measured with little error but that turns out to have little to do with actual intelligence. Third, sensitivity is a characteristic of good measures: They are able to detect even small differences where these exist. Current measures of intelligence do more than sort individuals into categories of, say, bright, average, and dull. They offer numerous distinctions within each.

Returning to adolescents’ stereotypes and their decision making, let’s consider what Horn and her associates found. They discovered that adolescents evaluated the actions of the student council as wrong, indicating that it would be unfair to punish a group simply because the type of damage that had been done fit the stereotype of the group. However, they also found that the types of reasons adolescents brought to bear in supporting this position differed depending on whether the actions were consistent with their stereotypes of either group. When their stereotypes were confirmed, adolescents were less likely to bring moral arguments to bear, leading to fewer concerns about fairness in the absence of supporting evidence. Only by using several response measures could the investigators sort out these differing relationships.

 

Source

S. Horn, M. Killen, & C. Stangor. (1999). The influences of group stereotypes on adolescents’ moral reasoning. Journal of Early Adolescence, 19: 98–113.

Ethics: How Do Adolescents Feel When Making a Big Decision?

For many adolescents, the first major life decision they will make is about college. More specifically, for increasing numbers of adolescents, this decision concerns which college they will attend. At first blush, a decision such as this may sound relatively easy. But think, for a moment, of all that can be involved. The college one chooses can influence not only the type of work one pursues in life but, more immediately, other aspects of one’s life as well, such as where one lives, the friendships one maintains, and even the extent to which one goes into debt. How do adolescents feel when making such a life-framing decision? In order to find out, one must ask adolescents to talk about how they feel about a potentially difficult, and often personal, process.

What ethical concerns guide such research? The overriding principle governing any research with humans is to protect the dignity and welfare of the subjects who participate in the research. Investigators inform the subjects in their study that their participation is voluntary and can be discontinued at any point. They also inform them of anything that could affect their willingness to participate. Once individuals agree to serve as subjects, investigators assume responsibility for protecting them from physical or psychological distress. After the data have been collected, the investigators debrief the subjects, informing them about the nature of the study and removing any misconceptions that may have arisen. If investigators suspect any undesirable consequences, they have the responsibility to correct them. Any information gained about participants is confidential.

Let’s look at some research that illustrates these principles. Kathleen Galotti and Steven Kozberg (1996) at Carleton College asked high school juniors and seniors to describe, in writing, the process of making a decision about college and how they felt about it. Students initially wrote answers to these questions in the spring of their junior year and twice again as seniors. Prior to beginning the research, however, the investigators obtained written parental consent for students who were less than 18 years old as well as the consent of the students themselves. Notice that in order for participation to be voluntary, participants had to know what it was they were agreeing to. Accordingly, students and parents were informed that the research was about individuals’ college decision making. A second, and related, aspect of voluntary participation is the right of participants to discontinue the research at any point. In fact, a number of the students who completed several of the measures for this study dropped out before the research was finished.

How do high school students feel about the process of choosing a college? In general, these students gave themselves good marks for the way they handled the decision-making process but agreed that the process itself is stressful and at times even overwhelming. As one student put it:

Choosing what you’re going to do for a living and going to college are really big decisions that are going to affect the rest of your life and if you don't choose what’s best then you have screwed up your life! . . . It’s a rather confusing and bewildering decision. There are many colleges to choose from and they all seem alike. The brochures for colleges tend to seem similar to any other college brochure. It’s one of the first large decisions in a person’s life and it can affect the rest of life. That prospect is daunting. (Galotti & Kozberg, 1996, pp. 11–12)

 

Source

K. M. Galotti & S. F. Kozberg. (1996). Adolescents’ experience of a life-framing decision. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 25: 3–16.

Internal and External Validity: Cholas and Gang Girls

By Michael Wapner

In Los Angeles County alone there are more than 600 gangs with approximately 100,000 members. Gangs, once restricted to low-income inner city neighborhoods, now stretch into surrounding suburban neighborhoods and schools. Mexican American adolescents make up an increasing number of gang members in the suburbs surrounding Los Angeles, with females composing a significant subgroup in all Mexican American gangs.

Mary Harris (1994) of Bloomsburg University sought to understand the world of gang members, specifically that of Mexican American gang girls, or cholas, from their perspective. Accordingly, Harris interviewed 21 current and former gang girls in suburbs of Los Angeles, sometimes individually and at other times in groups, asking what motivated them to join a gang and how they felt about their gang activities. She conducted these interviews in different settings—in parks or street corners, neighborhood centers, the barrio, and their homes.

As a science, psychology has developed many powerful and subtle research techniques to ensure, as much as possible, the validity of its conclusions. Some of these techniques have been presented in the Research Focuses, like this one, distributed throughout the book. However, sometimes the most sophisticated techniques cannot deliver as dramatic and moving a look at living human experience as can a straightforward approach, such as simply approaching individuals in the daily contexts of their lives and asking them to recount their experiences.

Harris found a strong cohesion and an unwavering loyalty to the gang. When asked their reasons for joining, for instance, these girls spoke of their sense of belonging, as well as their need for group support.

Benita: All it really is that you want to be a Chola because you see the other girls that want to be a Chola and it looks as if they have fun and everything. You want to put the make-up on like them too. (Harris, 1994, p. 293)

Reselda: You can belong as long as you can back up yours—and don’t rat on your own homegirls or back away. If you don’t back them up and you run we’ll jump that girl out because she ain’t going to take care of nothing. All she wants is our backup and our support but she ain’t going to give us none of hers, so what’s the use of her being around. She has to be able to hold up the hood. (pp. 292–293)

These girls also spoke of their gang as a family; for many, loyalty to the gang came first. Most gang members derived their status, self-esteem, identity, and sense of belonging from the gang, which substituted for often weak support from family and the absence of any real connections to school.

Reselda: I used to hate my dad because of what he did to my mom. I grew up with this hatred and anger. . . . A lot of them do come from families that are messed up. A lot of girls, like they ain’t got backup in their families. If they get into a gang they got more backup. They’ve got more girls to really hang around with. . . . They ain’t got too much love in the family. So they don’t care what’s going on. If their family don’t care, she don’t care. Nothing’s going right in her house so what should she care about what’s going on out there. (p. 294)

As powerful and as clearly worthwhile as research such as this is, there can be problems. Harris conducted her interviews in the girls’ homes and neighborhood settings, even at times having several members of a gang present for a single interview. An advantage to conducting interviews in this way is that the girls were most likely to be comfortable, and hence candid, when in familiar settings or with their friends. A problem, however, is that one cannot be sure that what they said about their experiences was not influenced by the presence of other members of the gang or even by their knowledge that, though alone with Harris, their remarks might be overheard. It is possible, in other words, that they may have been less willing to admit to conflicts about belonging to a gang or to other feelings under such conditions. In short, there was more than one possible explanation for some of the findings. When research does not provide an unambiguous answer to the question it was designed to address, we say that it lacks internal validity.

A second type of validity is external validity. Does the answer we get apply only to the people we have observed, or can we generalize the findings to others? Just how representative are the findings? Can we assume that we have an accurate picture of the life of female gang members all over Los Angeles? California? The United States? This is the problem of external validity. The impression we get of gang life can be totally valid for these girls (a question of internal validity) and yet be largely invalid for other gangs (a question of external validity). External validity can also be affected by the very conditions that are necessary to achieve internal validity. Were Harris to have attempted to experimentally control for some of the factors that might affect the way gang girls responded in these interviews—such as by conducting individual interviews on a university campus—she might have obtained data that were unrepresentative of the way these girls would normally have responded, or might not even have been able to interview any gang girls at all!

 

Source

M. G. Harris. (1994). Cholas, Mexican-American girls, and gangs. Sex Roles, 30: 289–301.

Projective Measures: If Shakespeare Had Been a Woman, Romeo and Juliet Might Have Survived Romance

With Michael Wapner

Picture a couple sitting quietly beside a river. The spires of a town rise in the distance. What thoughts run through their minds in this peaceful setting? Homicide? Betrayal? Death? Stabbing? Rape? Impossible? Yet when late adolescent males were asked to tell a story about a scene such as the one above, over one-fifth spoke of violent acts such as these; very few females did. What are we to make of this violent imagery, or its absence?

Explanations of gender differences in aggression have typically assumed that females repress “normal” levels of aggression, that is, the levels seen in males. Susan Pollack and Carol Gilligan (1982) suggest another explanation for this gender difference. They suggest that differences in aggression reflect the way individuals of either sex perceive social realities. Males and females alike will respond with violence when they perceive danger, but each perceives danger in different settings.

Males are socialized to be independent and self-sufficient. Settings that limit their independence, by involving them in emotional connections with others, can challenge their sense of self. Will males see danger in situations that involve affiliation? Females are socialized to be interdependent and form connections with others. Will females perceive danger in situations in which they are isolated from others? Would settings of competitive achievement arouse fears of isolation by setting individual females apart from the group?

Deep-seated feelings such as reactions to danger are often difficult to observe and measure. Pollack and Gilligan used a projective measure—the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)—to get at these feelings. This measure consists of a series of ambiguous pictures; subjects are asked to tell a story about each. It is assumed that they will project themselves into the situation they are describing and actually tell about their own thoughts and feelings.

Projective measures such as the TAT give a rich, complex record of an individual’s feelings. Often the individual is unable to verbalize these feelings and may even be unaware of them. Because individuals respond to their interpretations of events rather than to the events themselves, projective measures have an additional advantage in that they let us see these interpretations.

TAT measures have a number of disadvantages as well. Extensive training is required before one can interpret the responses. Reliability and validity for these measures are frequently low; that is, the measure does not necessarily give the same “reading” each time it is used, and may not always tap what it was designed to measure. These problems are common with subjective measures such as the TAT, in which there is always a danger that the investigator may be reading his or her own feelings into the subject’s answers.

Pollack and Gilligan used two TAT cards that portrayed affiliation and two TAT cards portraying achievement. Individuals wrote stories to all four cards.

When the investigators analyzed the stories, they found that males wrote many more violent stories to the affiliation cards than to the achievement ones—more than three times as many. The opposite pattern emerged for females; nearly three times as many females wrote violent stories to the achievement cards as to the affiliation ones.

These findings support the hypothesis that males and females perceive danger in different settings. More specifically, the very relationships females seek in order to protect themselves from isolation—a setting they regard as dangerous—are the ones that males perceive as dangerous, because they involve connection with others.

William Shakespeare foresaw only doom and death in the adolescent love affair between Romeo and Juliet. Had Juliet taken the pen from his hand, we might have had a happier ending. Are adolescents still writing scripts that reflect these gender-specific fears? Or have changing sex roles spelled the end to this particular gender difference? Do the purveyors of popular culture know how males’ fears differ from females’? Do they use them? Movie and television producers may not have read Pollack and Gilligan, but when was the last time you saw a movie where the heroine chose career over love or the hero walked away from worldly success to start a family? If you do recall such a film or TV show, was it a commercial success? Would you pay to see such a movie?

 

Source

S. Pollack & C. Gilligan. (1982). Images of violence in Thematic Apperception Test stories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42: 159–167.

Questionnaires: Parenting Styles and Flow

By Michael Wapner

For too many students, schoolwork is drudgery. Even good students may find some classes and a good deal of homework boring. But there are those great occasions when a student finds a course fascinating—when the topic is so engrossing that an hour’s lecture seems to last only 10 minutes and when television can’t compete with the assigned reading. This experience of intrinsically rewarding immersion in an ongoing activity is termed flow, and you will not be surprised to find that students who frequently have this experience in school tend to learn well and achieve much.

Research suggests that episodes of flow occur when individuals experience a balance between the challenges of a task and their abilities to meet that challenge. That is, the task must be sufficiently demanding to present a challenge, but students must also experience their talents as up to the task. If the task requires less than the available skills, then it will be boring. If skills are not up to the task, then individuals will experience anxiety.

Kevin Rathunde (1996) of the University of Utah wondered whether there was a connection between students’ likelihood of experiencing flow while engaged in schoolwork and their relationship with their parents; in other words, whether a particular family context corresponds to adolescents’ experience of flow at school. The question arose from theorizing about the effects of various patterns of parenting. Based on the work of other investigators, Rathunde identified two dimensions of the parent–adolescent relationship and hypothesized that conditions at home had to be favorable on both dimensions to maximize the likelihood of flow experiences at school. On the one hand, parents who are supportive and patient give the student the security to risk involvement in new and engaging tasks. On the other hand, parents who are challenging and expect the adolescent to assume more mature responsibilities motivate achievement. It is both the confidence to try and the motivation to achieve, Rathunde guessed, that give rise to the experience of flow in academic contexts.

But how might one go about testing this idea? Rathunde had high school students wear pagers (a technique described in the textbook’s Research Focus Box 6.1 on sampling), allowing him to sample the quality of their experiences as they worked. He also asked students and their parents to fill out a questionnaire assessing dimensions of family interaction. Questionnaires, along with interviews, are a type of survey research. Surveys obtain information from large numbers of people, through the use of personal reports. Rathunde, for instance, surveyed 165 adolescents and their parents—a total of 400 people. The use of personal reports has its strengths and weaknesses. A major strength of this type of data is the chance it offers to study behavior that otherwise could not easily be observed. Parenting, for instance, is a behavior that extends over time, rather than occurring in a limited, and easy-to-observe, time frame. Having adolescents and their parents report on parenting by filling out a questionnaire offers a convenient alternative to many hours of observation. Personal report data, as obtained through questionnaires, is also useful for private behaviors, such as sexual activity, or even illegal ones, such as drug use. A related advantage to the use of questionnaires, unlike face-to-face interviews, is the anonymity they offer individuals, who at times may be asked to disclose very personal information. Because most questionnaires rely on closed-ended questions, ones that supply individuals with alternative answers from which to choose, data are easy to score; in contrast, data obtained from interviews require elaborate preprocessing or coding before being analyzed. Because of the ease of scoring answers, questionnaires can be given to large numbers of people at relatively little expense to the investigator.

There also are disadvantages to the use of questionnaires. They can only be given to people who can read, thus eliminating their use with very young children or others with limited reading skills. Nonnative English speakers may also find them difficult. Individuals also appear to find it less interesting to fill out a questionnaire than to be interviewed, making participation somewhat less likely than with the use of personal interviews. A more serious disadvantage, however, is the investigator’s inability to interpret questions for an individual who might not understand or might misinterpret the questions’ meaning, as can be done in an interview, thereby ensuring that each participant has answered the questions as they were intended. Another disadvantage to questionnaires is the opportunity for distortion, either by deliberately changing information (as might occur in surveys on drug use among adolescents) or by failing to remember events as they really happened. Our memories are notably better for pleasant events or occasions in which we come off looking good. This type of distortion is known as the social desirability effect.

What did Rathunde find about parenting correlates of flow? As he anticipated, students whose parents both supported and challenged them reported more optimal experiences when working at school tasks. Specifically, the dimension of parental support was related to students’ reports of feeling open, excited, and involved in what they were doing, or to flow, and the dimension of parental challenge was related to their goal directedness.

 

Sources

P. C. Cozby. (1997). Methods in behavioral research (6th ed.). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

M. Csikszentmihalyi. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.

K. Rathunde. (1996). Family context and talented adolescents’ optimal experience in school-related activities. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 6: 605–628.

Theory-Guided Research: How Sexist Is Our Language?

Masculine words such as he and man have been used generically in English for centuries to refer to individuals of either sex. In contrast, when comparable words such as she or woman are used, the listener knows that the person being referred to is female. But how generic are those masculine words? Are listeners equally likely to think of a woman as a man when they hear “he”? Or do they do a quick semantic shuffle and mentally note that the word could also refer to females?

The question is an interesting one, but the answer has been difficult to obtain. It’s hard to observe quick semantic shuffles, especially when these are mental. In this case, theory suggests a way to get some answers. Sik Hung Ng (1990) used the concepts of proactive inhibition and release from proactive inhibition, concepts derived from a theory of learning and memory, to determine how words are linguistically coded in memory.

We know that words are coded both for their specific meaning and for category membership. Thus the word poodle would be coded in terms of the animal’s specific characteristics (for example, curly hair, intelligence, pointed snout), but also in terms of the category “dog.” This is true for man as well. “Man” would be coded in terms of specific characteristics (such as adult, human) and also in terms of the category “male.” But are words such as he and man assimilated just as easily into the feminine category as the masculine one? Linguistically speaking, that is, are they truly generic?

The concept of proactive inhibition suggests a way of finding out. Proactive inhibition refers to interference caused by prior learning when remembering new material. The interference is greatest when the old and new material are similar. In other words, one’s ability to learn something new is inversely related to how much similar material one has previously learned. Proactive inhibition tells us that memory for a new word will not be as good if one has already memorized other words from the same category (that is, if the new word shares the same linguistic category) than if the word is different from others one has memorized (belongs to a different linguistic category). Release from proactive inhibition occurs when the new word is from a different category; the release takes the form of better memory for the distinctive than the similar item. These twin concepts provide a means for discovering the linguistic category of any word. If the linguistic code for his and man is truly a masculine one, these words will not be remembered as easily following a list of other masculine word (proactive inhibition) as after a list of feminine ones (release from proactive inhibition).

Adolescents were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they listened to pairs of feminine words (queen/Linda, nun/Mary, girl/Iris, mom/Ruth) or masculine ones (king/Ivan, son/Lewis, boy/Ross, dad/Mike). After each list, they heard two additional pairs (man/Robin and his/Chris). Unlike the names in the masculine or feminine list, both Robin and Chris are unisex names. Will man and his be as easy to remember after the list of masculine pairs as after the feminine? If so, these words are genuinely generic.

Theory tells us that we first need to check for a buildup of proactive inhibition over the initial list of pairs—that is, to look for poorer recall of the last words than the first ones. As expected, this occurred. Next, we need to determine whether proactive inhibition continued for the generic words when they followed the masculine list, and whether release from proactive inhibition occurred following the feminine list. Both of these occurred as well.

These findings tell us that the words man and his are coded as masculine words in memory and are not truly generic. The author notes that if they are generic, then their usage in sentences such as the following should not appear incongruous: “Throughout most of history, men have always breast-fed their babies.” But sentences such as these do jar and prompt a rereading to discover what is amiss.

The problem adolescents face is not one of having to make sense of incongruities such as the preceding example. The more serious problem occurs when they experience no incongruity—when language so structures experience that half of humankind can be excluded.

 

Source

S. H. Ng. (1990). Androcentric coding of man and his in memory by language users. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26: 455–464.