Seeking a Mentor in Psychology Field

[kristincau]

Hello! My name is Kristin. I am a science research student in high school and am looking for a mentor who will be willing to assist me during my studies. My current project is to find the percent accuracy of a person's judgement based on personality. I plan to show a number of people the picture of someone and ask the person to answer questions such as how old they think the person is, what their job is, what their income is and so forth. However, in order to complete this project, I will need someone to help me an eliminate all the interfering factors such as prejudice from my project and was hoping if you would be able to help me. I realize you are all very busy, but I am hoping you could give me a hand in my experiment. Thank you.

[MaryamM]

Hi, Kristin!

I think you would be much more successful in finding a mentor if you went to a local university and asked a professor of psychology there. They might have more time and be more knowledgeable and thus, could assist you in a more effective manner.

Best of luck!

~Maryam M.

[meredithhodgkinson]

Kristin, This sounds like a very sophisticated study. I think a first step should be deciding exactly what your research question is. I think it is: you want to know which personality factors of the rater influence the interpretation of the ratee (photographed person). You won't be able to control for all the influences of the rater (There are probably hundreds - all the way from the socio-cultural level to individual, biological differences). But, you can measure several of the influences, as you mentioned: age, sex, and some psychological metrics of the rater. If you decided which psychological metrics you want to measure, I can point you to some brief personality tests.
Things to decide/think about:
About how many rater subjects can you get? Can you get a range of ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc? Or is your sample of raters homogenous (mostly from the same population, like high school students at your school).
Which personality characteristics do you want to know about? (These should be influenced by your review of background literature).
How many photos will you have each rater rate?
Meredith H

[kristincau]

Hey Meridith! Thank you so much for the reply and I apologize for replying so late. The questions you asked me helped a lot with my trying to organize exactly what I was trying to find. I'm going to change my question to what is the percent accuracy of a teenager's judgement based on appearance. I want at least 50 raters, but the more the better. They should all be teenagers from around 13- 19 years old and it would be best if they all came from a different background (Spanish, Korean, French, Chinese, African, American, Japanese etc). I'm hoping to have around 10-15 photographs for each of the raters to rate.
I'm afraid,however, that I do not understand your question regarding personality characteristic and personality factors.

Thank you again very much for your reply, it its greatly appreciated!