23 October 2013 (This is more or less a brainstorming session to begin fleshing out these thesis ideas and, and, and, to satisfy the assignment requirements for Social Psychology. Bear with me folks. It’s getting interesting. And if anyone at all has any suggestions to improve this, please let me know.) Original hypothesis: Individuals and small groups are influenced by intentional sexist propaganda embedded in media texts that influence unintentional propaganda in conversational language. 2. If I was to use a survey method for my study, how might I change my hypothesis? If I were to use a survey method for my study I may change my hypothesis to reflect that survey thus, Individuals and small groups are influenced by intentional sexist propaganda embedded in media texts that influence unintentional propaganda in conversational language surveyed through word association and analogy tests. 3. Has this method ever been used to test hypotheses similar to mine? How? To what effect? Yes, this method has been used to test hypotheses similar to mine in the, Individual Differences in “’Reading between the Lines’: The Word Association Implications Test (WAIT),” but not in the specific way that I intend to apply it. It was applied in the cited study in such a manner that included WAIT, the WAIS-R Similarities test (Wechsler,1981), and a practice form of the Miller Analogies Test. The resulting effects of these tests was a prediction that WAIT requires reading between the lines and understanding language clues and good subject-judges surpass less successful counterpart subject judges on measures of abstract reasoning. While a similar test would not necessarily test an individual’s ability to read between the lines, it would test the individual’s transference of intentional sexist propaganda into individual and small group propaganda. 4. What are some possible benefits of using this method to test my hypothesis? The possible benefits of using this method to test my hypothesis are the codifying of questions to determine the degree of the sexism present in the media and in the resulting unintentional propaganda present in small groups. 5. What are some possible limitations of using this method to test my hypothesis? The possible limitation is that the sexist language will be discovered to be so embedded that it will be difficult to distinguish between sexist language and sexist media texts. 6. What ethical issues (if any) might I have if I used a survey method to test my hypothesis? How might I overcome these issues? (Hint: Have any other studies had to address these issues?) The only ethical issues that may arise are ones of sexist language seriously offending the survey participants. However, I don’t foresee this as an ethical issue. Rather, it is an issue of ongoing sexism present in the language and in the media that must be investigated and eventually eliminated, but that is more of a longitudinal study combined with counter propaganda to eliminate sexism in language.