Question

How can I use this topic in a study or experiment scenario: adolescent dating violence? Questionnaires, independent variables, dependent variables, participants, ages? I like the topic, but I am having a hard time determining how the experiment should go for my psychology class.

Answer 1

Hi,

You have come up with an interesting topic. Firstly, you need to go through the literature to gain an in-depth understanding of the directions for future research. Since it is not feasible to go through the literature within such a short time-span, I would give you a few suggestions based on my knowledge of the topic:

Go ahead with a study - a correlational one

Follow a mixed methodology - use standardized psychoological tests as well as the interview method. The first would help you get quantitative data and the second would provide you with qualitative data. Depending upon your level of comfort you can either opt for content analysis or thematic analysis (for qualitative analysis).

Note: I would suggest that you measure dating violence as part of a broader study to make it easier for you to explore other variables

Proposed study : A comparative study of relationship characteristics in homosexual versus heterosexual teenagers.

Participants: Homosexual and heterosexual teenagers ( 13 to 19 years of age) who are dating for at least 6 months. Make it a small sample study if it is difficult to find homosexual couples who are willing to participate - although, you can reach out to them via facebook groups and provide them clarity about your study. So a sound small sample study would need you to have around 30 participants - 15 homosexual teenagers (you might even get sub-groups here) and 15 heterosexual teenagers (boys and girls). But I would suggest go for 60 participants at the least, so that you can use parametric statistics - such as pearson correlation.

Being a correlational study, you will not have IV and DV so to speak.

Now let us look at what you might be measuring : demographic variables - such as age of the participant and age of their partner , sexual orientation, socio-economic status (all of these have to be measured using the Demographic Infomation Schedule - which you need to frame by adding a sentence which explores each of these variables); manipulation tactics (measured using Manipulation Tactics Scale by Buss et al., 1987); Relationship satisfaction (Hendrick,1988), Affectionate communication ( refer to the paper - the measurement of affectionate communication by Floyd and Morman, 1998); Dating Violence (Dating violence questionnaire by Rodriguez-Diaz et al., 2017)

Take interviews - it would be best to go for sem-structured interviews. Ask critical questions such as do you feel happy in the relationship? do you feel a void at times in your current relationship? have you even felt physically threatened or emotioanlly abused? where do you see your relationship 5 years from now? are you satisfied with the public display of affection your partner engages in, on social media?

Now, comes the statistics: mean, SD, z-scores/t-scores ( to find out if there are any differences between the 2 groups), if the value is significant (p<5 or p<1) then there is a significant difference between the 2 groups. There may be a significant difference with regards to say affectionate communication and dating violence but no difference in the other variables. Another important point - you will compare them across all dimensions and you will also need to conduct a correlational analysis to find out if dating violence has a significant positive correlation with manipulation tactics, a significant negative correlation with relationship satisfaction and with affectionate communication. So getting back to your IV, DV, we are considering dating violence as the DV (or outcome measure as it is preferably called in correlational analysis).

Therefore, what are your objectives:

1. is there any difference between homosexual and heterosexual teenagers who are dating, with regards to - relationship satisfaction, affectionate communication, manipulation tactics and dating violence?

2. is there a significant correlation between dating violence and manipulation tactics, dating violence and affectionate communication, dating violence and relationship satisfaction?

3. - it would also be interesting to explore the relationship between manipulation tactics and relationship satisfaction, and affectionate communication. In fact you could conduct a pearson correlation to explore the relationship among all these varibales. You might come up with interesting results.

4. The content analysis will also give you some vital inputs which you otherwise cannot unearth from psychological tests.

Hope this gives you some ideas!

Would love to hear you feedback.