Sociology Experiment

Erik Wood
Myles M.

Research Problem
How will people react when they are knowingly being videotaped while shopping? We do not know how people react when they are being videotaped without their consent. There are no consequences for not doing the experiment. Our research is exploratory.

Operation
We need to consider the time of day, number of people, and how the Target employees will react. To explain the observations I need a camera for evidence. We do not think the area or atmosphere could be improved. The concept has not changed.

Hypothesis
There was no stated hypothesis for our study. The independent variables for our study were the number of people, the type of people, and how the employees reacted. The dependant variable is how obvious we are in video taping the people. No the only other variable identified was time of day, but we could not do anything about it. Our hypothesis was that a large number of random people, when obviously being taped, will become uncomfortable and lash out in anger.

Research Design
Mode of Observation
The study was observatiuonal. It suited our study and hypothesis well because that’s how we intended to conduct the study.
Sample
A sample was used for this experiament. We decided to select the non working man sample because we were not comfortable video taping women and children. The sample does not represent the population of Target. It probably will not be generalized with other populations

Findings
We found that most people were uncomfortable with being video taped, but they did not lash out at us. Most either glanced at us and walked away or they put their heads down and tried to avoid us. One man did confront us, but he later said he was just joking and chuckled. We followed one man in a hat, and he kept avoiding us and ignoring us. We continued to follow him until he finally got away. How we lost him we still do not know.

Summary and Conclusion
There are no other interpretations because the results were conclusive. One might say since we did not video tape women and children, we did not get better reactions because people do not like when other people video tape women and children. Study showed us that people indeed are uncomfortable when video taped and try to avoid confrontation. The result showed that people are in fact uncomfortable when video taped and this is the reason we do not video tape people doing everyday tasks, it is rude. Other hypothesis that could be concluded from this study is that people do not get confrontational and feel very uncomfortable when video taped. If I was an agency I would do a more widespread study and I would video tape everyone possible.