Description
Instructions
Please answer the following questions. Your answers should be typed using 12-pt Times New
Roman font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins on all sides. Include a page number, the
assignment number, and your name at the top of each page. Assignments should posted on
Course Works before class on October 5th .
Your answers should be in sentence form and self-contained. State the relevant facts and draw
the appropriate conclusions with reference to these facts.
The questions below are grouped into sets – within sets of questions (that is, for questions about
the same study or studies), your answers can be cumulative. That is, you can refer to earlier
responses within sets; you do not have to describe the study fully in response to each and every
question.Questions
1. There is an article from the New York Times Magazine entitled “What Is It About 20-
Somethings.” (available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-
t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0). The article does a solid job in summarizing social science
research on the topic of “emerging adulthood” for a non-professional audience. Please read
the article (well, you need not read more than the first five or six pages), then answer the
following questions.
a. What are the traditional milestones of adulthood discussed in this article? Do you
believe these to be relevant milestones of adulthood today?
b. What additional variables do you think should be included in studying —and why?
c. Although the article does not offer much discussion of causes, what factors might you
think contribute to changing conceptions of adulthood?
2. Now suppose you just received a grant from the Social Science Research Council to conduct
a study to examine other domains that characterize emerging adulthood. In an interview with
Psychology Today, Arnett characterized more relevant criteria as “accepting responsibility
for yourself, making independent decisions, and becoming financially independent.” Briefly
describe a study of your own making that will examine these three criteria, paying particular
attention to the following questions:
a. What dependent and independent variables will you include?
b. How will you operationalize the variables of your study? Please be explicit in how
you will create your variables.
c. What are your hypotheses regarding the relationship(s) you will examine?
d. How will you collect data to evaluate these hypotheses?
3 In May 2002, United States Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced a policy change in
which the U.S. Department of Education would allow the creation and expansion of single-
sex schools (schools containing only males or only females). While the overwhelming
majority of schoolchildren in the United States are schooled in classrooms containing males
and females (coeducational or “coed” schools), there has been growing policy interest in
single-sex schools to address girls’ lower performance in mathematics and science. The
research underlying this interest has found that girls in single-sex schools do better in these
areas because they have higher levels of self-esteem than do their peers in coed schools.
Drawing on criteria for causality, how would you examine the relationship between
attendance in a single-sex school and performance in math and science among girls? (Please
limit your answer to three paragraphs.)