原创认知心理学研究 on Chidren's Beliefs

Children’s Beliefs (Xue)

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Aim & Introduction: The aim of the study is to find out more about children’s beliefs. The study is designed in order to investigate whether children’s recognition towards objects around them will be more realistic with the growth of the age, that is, whether older children will perceive objects in a more realistic way comparing to the younger ones. This study belongs to the cognitive approach in psychology, since it serves both its assumptions. The method used to conduct the study is questionnaire. 

Sampling, Design & Procedure: The participants of this study are all students from the primary school of which Ally, the researcher went to. The sampling technique is random sampling, participants are randomly picked by a computer from the students’ name-list provided by the school. The sample size is 60. The participants are divided into 3 groups of 20, with 10 girls and 10 boys in each. Children in different groups have different ages, which are 6, 8, and 10 years old severally. Hence, the grade they are in are 1st grade, 3rd grade, and 5th grade respectively. Each participant will be required to fill out the following questionnaire, with both open and closed questions included, aiming to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Participants are instructed to gather at a huge classroom at school, with normal, gentle light and no noises. They will be given informed consent of the real purpose of the study, that is to conduct a psychology research on children’s beliefs. They will each be given a pencil, and are required to answer all of the questions on the questionnaire before leaving the classroom. The researcher and a teacher at school will be in the classroom to supervise the participants and provide help, if any of them have any questions, or meet problems understanding any of the vocabularies presented in the questionnaire, etc. If anyone meets problems on interpreting words, the researcher will then explain the meanings to them till they can understand. After all 60 participants have completed the questionnaire, the researcher will record and analyze the data collected. She will calculate the means, medians, and modes respectively out of each group of data, and make bar diagrams, pie charts, stem-leaf diagrams, box-whisker diagrams, etc., to visually illustrate the data whilst comparing and contrasting them from the three groups of participants of different ages. In the end of the study, the researcher will draw conclusions out of the results being found. 

Here is the complete questionnaire for the respondents to fill out:

1. Your age. 

2. Are you a girl or a boy?

3. How many toys do you have, that you usually play with? Please answer in a number. 

4. Do your give names to your toys? Select one. 

Options: 

a. Yes, I give names to all my toys. 

b. Yes, I give names to some of my toys. 

c. No, I don’t give names to any toys. 

5. Do you believe your toys can feel happy, sad, and angry, etc.? Select one. 

Options: 

a. Yes, I think all my toys can feel happy, sad, and angry. 

b. Yes, I think some of my toys can feel happy, sad, and angry. 

c. No, I think toys cannot feel happy, sad, or angry. 

6. Do you talk to your toys? If you do, how often? Select one. 

Options: 

a. I talk to my toys everyday. 

b. I often talk to my toys. 

c. I sometimes talk to my toys. 

d. I never talk to my toys. 

7. Have you made up any stories about your toys or any other things around you? If you have, please write about one of the stories that you have made. If you have never made up any stories, it’s okay, please leave the space blank. 

8. Imagine if one day your favorite toy is lost, then your parents buy you a completely same toy. How would you feel? Would you be okay and happy with that or would you miss your old toy? Please write down your thoughts. 

Pre-Evaluation & Further Information: High validity is ensured to this study. Firstly, the sample size is not small, and is fairly balanced among three groups of age and two common types of gender, which will increase the generalizability to the result. Secondly, both open and closed questions are used in the questionnaire, deriving both quantitative and qualitative data effectively. At the same time, various measures of central tendency and graphs are used to provide a comprehensive representation of the result. In addition, the questionnaire is designed in a suitable tone using easy vocabularies. For example,  the word “emotions” is replaced by “happy, sad, and angry, etc”. Meanwhile, the researcher and a teacher are always ready to help during the whole procedure. These are to make it easier for children to participate, therefore boosting the replicability of the study. Thirdly, the procedure of the study is completely the same for all participants, with the controls of extraneous variables such as light and sound. Thus, the study is highly standardized. All of the above mentioned points are to raise the validity to its results. On ethical consideration, this study does not have any noticeable ethical issues. Informed consent is given to the participants and their parents beforehand. There is no deception, and no participants will meet any risk of being harmed physically or psychologically following the procedure of the study. Furthermore, the questionnaire is anonymous with no significant privacy information asked. No filler questions are used in the questionnaire, for I consider there does not have to have any to effectively serve the purpose of the study. Moreover, social-desirability bias will make extreme minor influence to the questionnaire results, since all the participants are children aged up to just 10, they are unlikely to intentionally show demand characteristics. These also increase the validity to the results. Nevertheless, the inter-rater reliability to this study may not be high, since each researcher individual may have different interpretations toward the children’s qualitative answers to the open questions, though there is only one researcher in the study. 

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