Name: _____Ian Nance________________Period: _6______ Date:__8/28/2015_______

Research Project Completion Form

TOPIC: ____What Shapes Our Personalities?______
1. What was your hypothesis?
I suspected that most people would gravitate towards naming their family as a positive
influence of their personality. In addition, I thought that people would name the
influences of the world as negatives.
2. What method of research design did you choose and why?
I created a questionnaire, because I felt that it was the best way to gather a large sample
of people who could answer my questions.
3. How did you define the ambiguous (unclear) aspects of your topic?
I simply stuck to a certain aspect of my topic instead of surveying to deal with other
complex parts such as genetics. The questions in my survey avoid a wide range of
subtopics in order to avoid ambiguity.
4. What variables do you expect to impact your project?
My control variable consists of the high school students that are going to take my
survey/questionnaire. I will make sure that those taking the survey are students of
Westerville North, as I want the point of view of the respondees to be similar. In addition,
my independent variable is the gender of those who will be taking my survey. Allowing
males and females to take my survey could change the results, as the answers from each
gender may vary greatly. Overall, my control variable enables me to test similar
viewpoints, but my independent variable could lead to uncorrelated data.
5. How do you plan on addressing those variables?
To address these variables, I will assess the responses for what they are. Since gender
does not directly harm my results, this independent variable is not as important to me as
my control variable. Maintaining a select age range is critical, because failing to do so
could drastically affect my results.
6. Data Collection:
How did you collect your data?
I created a survey/questionnaire and asked several people from Westerville North to take
it. From there, Google Drive recorded the responses.

Who did your project target?

Westerville North High School Students
Did it matter who you targeted? Why or why not?
Yes, because targeting an audience of different ages could have created drastic changes in
the responses.
7. Data Analysis:
How did you analyze your data?
I simply read through the responses.
What were you looking for? (mean, mode, frequency, correlation, etc.)
While analyzing, I looked for a correlation between the data. In other words, I made an
effort to find similarities that existed in several of the responses.
What were your results?
I found that people were very quick to name their family as a positive influence towards
the shaping of their personality. Included in my results, it was evident that while family
tended to be a definite positive, other influences were maybes when it came to whether
or not people believed they had a positive or negative influence towards shaping their
personality. Generally speaking, those who responded to my survey believe that things
such as friends, media, and technology can be good or bad, but it depends on the
situation. Overall, I would say that these results show a general indifference to the impact
of the world, but a great appreciation for family.
Did your results prove or disprove your hypothesis? How do you know?
The results partly proved and partly disproved my hypothesis. My suspicion that people
would name their family as a positive influence was most definitely correct, but I was
surprised to discover that those who responded view the influences of the world as both a
positive and a negative, rather than strictly a negative.

6. Reflection:
What was the most difficult thing about this project?
Developing questions that would allow people to truly share their beliefs.

If you could ask a different question or questions to improve your results what would it
be?
How do these forces affect the way you behave?

Is your view of the topic different now? Why or why not?

No. After reading through the responses I do not believe that family has a superior
influence on shaping a personality than the outside world. However, while I do think
family has a significant impact, both genetically and behaviorally, I do not think culture
in its entirety should be ignored as much as those who responded tended to.

If you could do the entire project over again, what would you do differently?
I would have recreated the survey to better allow those who responded to explain each
individual component of things that shape their personality. Instead, I almost asked them
to sum up these influences as a whole.
7. Documents:
Please attach a copy of your survey, interview questions, and explanation of your
observation or experiment. (whatever you did to collect your data)
Please attach a copy of the pieces of literature you found that related to your topic of
study (shoot for at least 3)
Survey/Questionnaire:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1t_uzVYEhRXleJpH3a88oltNcWiufnBV83mQql4mR9tM
/viewform?usp=send_form

Pieces of Literature:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/me-myself-and-us-whatshapes-our-personality-traits/article21386496/
http://www.ukessays.com/essays/psychology/the-factors-that-shape-our-personalitypsychology-essay.php
http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/17122/1/The-Things-That-Shape-Who-You-Are-Surprising-Factors-That-Influence-Personality.html