Relationships and Grades

What area of interest/research question do you wish to explore through a research study design?

• Do students who are in a relationship (have a boyfriend, husband, girlfriend, or wife) during college have lower grades than students who remain single throughout college?

What variables or concepts are you looking to observe and/or manipulate?

• I am looking to observe the academic performance of students in both groups (i.e. their GPA).

What type of design would best suit your research question? (Experimental, Correlational, etc)

• A correlational study would best suit my research question.

What research method would you use to conduct your experiment? (Survey, case study, naturalistic observation, lab experiment, etc.)

• I would use a survey to ask students about their relationship status and their GPA.

Give a hypothesis about what you think you might find.

• Students who remain single throughout the duration of their college career will perform better academically and will have a higher GPA.

What might be the benefits and implications of this study? In other words, who would gain from it?

• The results from this study may help both students who are or are not in a relationship re-evaluate their priorities (i.e. If the study shows that single students do better than students in relationships, then those students in relationships may reconsider being in one if they worry about the consequences of remaining in a relationship).

Please reflect on the process of designing this experiment. What were the challenges you faced? Was this more/less difficult than you expected? How?

• One possible challenge I can imagine being conflicted with is students being reluctant to tell the truth in the survey. Students in a relationship may say they have a higher GPA than they really do have because they do not want to blame their relationship on their grades.