Participants
We collected data from a sample of undergraduate students at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The students were all in an upper division course titled Research Methods in Psychology. The participants were between the ages of 18 to 32, with a mean age of 20.99 years and a standard deviation of 1.82 years. Out of the 208 students that we collected data from, 80 were male and 128 were female. In terms of class year, one was a freshman, four were sophomores, 98 were juniors and 105 were seniors. The participants were not compensated for taking part in the study, however, students were required to partake in the voluntary study for their psychology class.
Design
We created a questionnaire with a series of questions …show more content…
Additionally, the subjects utilized a seven-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly Agree) to indicate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the following statements: “Most of my family thinks that I should do aerobic exercise,” “Most of my friends think that I should do aerobic exercise,” and “Most people who are important to me think I should do aerobic exercise.” We asked the participants to bubble in the number which most appropriately corresponded to these questions about social norms surrounding aerobic exercise. Lastly, the subjects were asked to type in the total number of minutes spent doing aerobic exercise a week. The independent variables for this study include the participant’s perceived social pressure, specifically by friends, family, and other important figures in their life. The dependent variable is the amount of time spent on aerobic activity in minutes per …show more content…
These two variables were weakly correlated, r(206)= .16, p=.019, as summarized in Table 1. Although these two variables have a weak, positive correlation, this conclusion is still important due to a significant p-value. Therefore, the probability that this correlation arose due to sampling variation or chance is very low. We can then conclude that, in general, as perceived subjective norms by friends increase, amount of time spent on aerobic exercise also