Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hey,
Im doing a project on how Fashion Impacts the Behaviour of others around us. I was wondering if this would be an interesting and good idea?
Basically i am getting random testers people in the mall. Having a TOMBOY and a YOUNG LADY ask for the time. While somebody films. THen from the film we will see the different reactions. Is there any good variations to the project? (nerd and non-nerd)????

Thanks,
Becky and Lexi

Hi Becky and Lexi,

This sounds like a fun project ! A good idea will be to make sure you ask as many people as possible the time, rather than just a few, so that you can draw some general conclusions. That way you can also look at more detailed factors such as whether the person you ask is in a hurry, whether they're young or old, male or female etc. The more examples you have, the better.

Hello,

Hope you don't mind my jumping in with a few more quick comments.

Sounds like a really neat project.

One thing you might want to consider is how to get some sort of objective measure from your video records.

Simply recording your own subjective evaluation of each interaction isn't bad, but it would be nice to come up with something a little more concrete.

A few suggestions:

- One idea might be to have several different people look at the video and record their observations in a standard way. That will give you some confidence that any qualitative differences you see are really there, and aren't the result of some bias of your own. For example, your evaluators could rate statements such as, "the subject responds in a friendly way" or "behaves as if he or she is impatient" or whatever else you want to measure. Not letting the evaluators see each other's evaluations until afterward is probably a good idea.

- If possible, try not to let the evaluator watching each video know whether they're watching a tomboy or young lady case. (Perhaps by never filming the researcher or by keeping the camera steady and blanking off half the TV screen.) That way you can guard against their unintentionally reading their own expectation into the results.

- If you have time and feel like it, try measuring any easily measurable thing you can think of and see if the results are interesting. For example, the total time for the interaction, the time between first approach and making motions in order to look at a timepiece, how far away the person stands while answering (easy to measure if you choose a tiled floor). Whether or not they actually give you the time is the easy one, I suppose. The precision and accuracy with which they report the time might even be interesting. I've no idea if any of those will yield interesting results, but it could be fun to measure them and see.

Good luck.