Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

i don't kmow how to go about this. Does using negative or postive words affect the outcome
(answer) of a question, what should i do ,where should i start from are there any sites that could help me? pla help me

Hi!
Sounds like an interesting topic. The use of negative and positive words in the question would definitely introduce some bias into the experiment/study. This would involve some knowledge of statistics, so you should try researching key topics such as bias, lurking variables, etc. This link describes a similar project:
http://www.rossmanchance.com/iscam/exampleCh1.html
Good luck!

Hello,

You have a good start on a project, since you have a question that you need to answer. If this is your science fair project, you will need to state your hypothesis, and then design an experiment that will answer your question. With a question like this, you need to do background research to find out more about your topic. I would suggest researching the following terms to help you with your hypothesis, and give you ideas for designing an experiment.

psychology of negative words
psychology of questions
perception

This could be a very good project. You might want to check out similar types of projects on the science buddies website to give you an idea of how to proceed:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... ?from=Home

I hope this will help you get started to the next step of your project. Please let us know if you have any other questions.


Donna Hardy

Hello,

It sounds like you have great information already given to help you out! Just one more thing to think about in terms of "real life" application: polls [magazines, newspapers, surveys, etc] depend on how questions are worded, so by putting something like "how polls can be biased" into a search engine you might be able to find a specific example of how wording affected a poll. Good luck!


-Susan