Banduras social learning theory Essay

Our study is based on the theory of operant conditioning and Bandura’s social learning theory. Operant conditioning states that learning happens through association, and we believe that car advertises are trying to make their target population associate buying their car with a desired characteristic/traits/lifestyles e.g. having a lot of female attention. Skinner described the ABC model of operant conditioning, which includes an antecedent, behaviour and a consequence. Bandura for his theory stated that learning can only occur if the four criteria (attention, retention, reproduction and motivation) were met. From looking at YouTube adverts we found that smaller cars had a tendency to have more feminine themes whereas larger cars tended to have more masculine themes.  Aim  To whether there is a difference between gender and the size of cars they drive.  Alternative Hypothesis:  Males will have a higher tendency to drive large cars while females will have a higher tendency to drive smaller cars  Null Hypothesis:  There will be no difference in gender and the size of the car they drive, and any difference will be due to chance. METHOD:  Design:  This is an independent group design and a quasi experiment as each participant can only be in either the male or the female category. We will gather our data by tallying, as our study will only include nominal data. This is useful as tallying is easy to analyse and draw up conclusions from. We are only looking at the gender of the driver and the type/size of their cars, so our data is quantitative. This is a non-participant naturalistic overt observation. Seeing as our results are nominal, this is an independent group design and the hypothesis predicts a difference. We will try our best to operationalise our variables by tallying the cars for the same period of time and by collecting data in different locations throughout Maidstone. Our IV will be the gender and how dependent variable (DV) will be the size of the cars. To make it easier to see the driver or the car, we will be collecting our data by a set of traffic lights, and tallying in the correct sections.  Participants  All of our participants will be over 17, as this is the legal minimum driving age. We will be using opportunity sampling as only those driving at the time of the study will take part in the study. Apparatus  Pen, paper and clipboard   Procedure  1. A table was draw up to collect results in (a copy can be found in appendix)  2. Researchers decided time and place of when they will be getting results  3. Researches went to location, stood by the nearest traffic light and collect results  4. Next lesson, the results were pooled  5. Adjustments were made  6. Carried out inertial test using chi-squared test  Control:  Pilot study was not to include family and sports cars as they are marketed differently and tend to be gender neutral. We increased our ecological validity by carrying out the experiment in different places in Maidstone. Ethics We followed most of the ethical guidelines by: ensuring that no participants were harmed physically or psychology and that the results were anonymous. Participants were not given fully-informed consent and were not debriefed as this would be too time consuming, but if a participant was to ask about our study they would have been told the true aim of the study and having their results omitted if they want to.We will accept our null hypothesis and reject our alternative hypothesis because our observed value (1.34) of chi-squared is lower than the critical value(3.841) and this means our results aren’t significant. Therefore the probability of our results being due to chance equal p