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.)