263 CHAPTER 16 Social Tensions and Culture Wars The ideological and cultural warfare that raged within this country during the 1990s originated in some of the conflicts that had begun in the 1960s. Culture wars intensified after 1992, following Bill Clinton’s electoral triumph, which broke the Republican twelve- year hold on the White House. Deeply disappointed conservatives, particularly those on the Religious Right, believed that Clinton, the first baby-boomer president, epitomized all that had gone wrong with contemporary society and culture. They decried what they perceived to be a wide range of declines. Liberals, tolerant of many of the trends that conservatives denounced, joined by commercial interests profiting from some of them, battled back. They denounced conservatives as fanatics, bigots, and censors. American society was also driven during these years by profound divisions. An immigration explosion, an unintended consequence of the overhaul of American immigration policy during the heyday of Great Society reformism, revived immigration as a powerful social force and gave rise to demands for imposing new restrictions. An upsurge of multiculturalism, driven by the rights-conscious efforts of second-generation middle-class Asians and Hispanics, challenged the Anglocentrism of American popular culture. These challenges provoked furious responses from the defenders of the status quo. The class and racial divisions that had forever separated African Americans and white people continued in the 1990s, ensuring that black–white racial polarization perpetuated the most serious economic and social fissures of the era. 2000: A DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE During the decade of the 1990s, the nation’s population grew from 247 million to 281 million. The decennial increase of 34 million people was the largest ever. One-third of the nation’s population growth in the decade came from the influx of immigrants. Most of the immigrants emigrated from Hispanic countries within the Western Hemisphere or from a Pacific island or Asian nation. The new immigrants flocked to the big cities, but they also spread into all regions of the country. ( 10/15/2017 ) ( 28 /28 ) ( 263 ) 264 As the 1990s ended, there were 56 million Americans who were either immigrants or the children of immigrants, the largest number in U.S. history. In New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other metropolises, the new Hispanic and Asian populations settled into ethnic neighborhoods where they brought their distinctive cultures, manners, and styles. America’s big cities became home to the most diverse populations in world history. While cultural diversity brought energy and vitality, and made America’s big cities the most vibrant urban centers in the world, it also exacerbated social tensions. The huge influx of new people during the 1990s triggered an upsurge of nativism. In 1994 California voters approved Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that barred undocumented aliens from access ...

1. 263
CHAPTER 16 Social Tensions and Culture Wars
The ideological and cultural warfare that raged within this
country during the 1990s originated in some of the conflicts that
had begun in the 1960s. Culture wars intensified after 1992,
following Bill Clinton’s electoral triumph, which broke the
Republican twelve- year hold on the White House. Deeply
disappointed conservatives, particularly those on the Religious
Right, believed that Clinton, the first baby-boomer president,
epitomized all that had gone wrong with contemporary society
and culture. They decried what they perceived to be a wide
range of declines. Liberals, tolerant of many of the trends that
conservatives denounced, joined by commercial interests
profiting from some of them, battled back. They denounced
conservatives as fanatics, bigots, and censors.
American society was also driven during these years by
profound divisions. An immigration explosion, an unintended
consequence of the overhaul of American immigration policy
during the heyday of Great Society reformism, revived
immigration as a powerful social force and gave rise to demands
for imposing new restrictions. An upsurge of multiculturalism,
driven by the rights-conscious efforts of second-generation
middle-class Asians and Hispanics, challenged the
Anglocentrism of American popular culture. These challenges
provoked furious responses from the defenders of the status
quo. The class and racial divisions that had forever separated
African Americans and white people continued in the 1990s,
ensuring that black–white racial polarization perpetuated the
most serious economic and social fissures of the era.
2000: A DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE
During the decade of the 1990s, the nation’s population grew

2. from 247 million to 281 million. The decennial increase of 34
million people was the largest ever. One-third of the nation’s
population growth in the decade came from the influx of
immigrants. Most of the immigrants emigrated from Hispanic
countries within the Western Hemisphere or from a Pacific
island or Asian nation. The new immigrants flocked to the big
cities, but they also spread into all regions of the country.
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)
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/28
)
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264
As the 1990s ended, there were 56 million Americans who were
either immigrants or the children of immigrants, the largest
number in U.S. history.
In New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other metropolises,
the new Hispanic and Asian populations settled into ethnic
neighborhoods where they brought their distinctive cultures,
manners, and styles. America’s big cities became home to the
most diverse populations in world history.
While cultural diversity brought energy and vitality, and made
America’s big cities the most vibrant urban centers in the world,
it also exacerbated social tensions. The huge influx of new
people during the 1990s triggered an upsurge of nativism. In
1994 California voters approved Proposition 187, a ballot
initiative that barred undocumented aliens from access to
public schools, health clinics, and all other social services.
Federal courts declared most of the initiative’s provisions

3. unconstitutional, and it was never enforced.
In addition, the 2000 census highlighted the growing variety of
household living arrangements in America. Nuclear families
comprised less than one-fourth of the nation’s households, just
as many households were made up of a person living alone. The
number of single mothers heading a household increased rapidly
during the decade, especially among minority populations. In
1999 there were nearly 14 million single-parent families, most
headed by a woman who had never married. Approximately 15
percent of American households were poor, about the same
proportion that could be found in this country in 1965. The
large increase in poor, single-parent families during the 1990s
held ominous implications for millions of America’s children.
The rates for teenage eating disorders, drug use, depression, and
suicide all rose. Adolescents were one of the highest-risk
groups for contracting AIDS.
At the other end of the age spectrum, the 2000 census showed
there were 35 million people, age sixty-five and older, living
within the United States. Although the age sixty-five and older
groups increased rapidly during the 1990s, their proportion of
the total population actually declined from 12.6 percent in 1990
to 12.4 percent in 2000. For the first time in the history of the
census, the age sixty-five and older population had not grown
faster than the total population! In two regions, the Midwest and
the South, the proportion of the population aged sixty-five and
older actually declined. Among the older population categories,
those age eighty-five and older showed the largest percentage
increase. Among the age sixty-five and older groups, women
significantly outnumbered men. In 2000, there were 20.6
million women to 14.4 million men, roughly 60 percent women
to 40 percent men.
BUST, BOOM, AND BUST
Many intertwined problems, worsened by the recession that
struck in the early 1990s, hampered the American economy. The
recession had two major causes: cuts in military spending in the
aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of commercial real

4. estate markets in the wake of the overexpansion of the 1980s.
The annual trade deficit ranged between $40 billion and $60
billion. Annual federal deficits continued to run up huge
amounts of red ink. The national debt reached $4 trillion in
1992 and was approaching $5 trillion in 1995. The Federal
Reserve Board slashed interest rates to thirty-year lows, but the
economy did not recover. During the recession, about 9 million
unemployed workers struggled to find jobs. Housing starts, new
car sales, and business investment plummeted.
Long-term structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy that had
first appeared during the early 1970s persisted into the 1990s.
From 1890 to 1970, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of
3.5 percent, adjusted for inflation. That rate of economic
growth, sustained over much
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of the twentieth century, more than any other single factor,
created a prosperous middle- class society. Since 1973,
including the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s, the annual
rate of growth has averaged 2.2 percent. Sharply declining
growth rates have had devastating impacts on millions of
middle-class families. Since the mid-1970s, both real income
and the annual share of national income earned by the middle
classes have been sinking.
By the mid-1990s, the U.S. economy had recovered from
recession. By 1996, American industry once again led the world
in productive efficiency. U.S. automakers dominated the
markets for popular minivans, light trucks, and off-road
vehicles. In 1998 and 1999, American-made, powerful, and
expensive sport utility vehicles (SUVs) were the vehicles of
choice for those who could afford them.

5. The stock market soared to record highs in the late 1990s, with
high-tech stocks leading the way. The Dow Jones Index of thirty
industrial stocks rose from 3,900 in 1992 to a peak of 11,600 in
May 1999. The volume of shares traded on the New York Stock
Exchange rose exponentially during the 1990s, exceeding a
billion shares on many trading days. Profits were
extraordinarily large for some of the leading-edge companies.
Thousands of employees of aggressive high-tech firms became
instant millionaires on paper by acquiring stock options in the
companies they worked for. Microsoft became the world’s
largest corporation, primarily because of its virtual monopoly of
Windows operating platforms. Bill Gates, the CEO of Microsoft
and its largest individual stockholder, personified the new
economy of the 1990s and became an iconic figure.
There was a downside to the high-flying economy of the late
1990s. Corporate managers enjoyed high incomes while blue-
collar workers of the same companies struggled to earn a living
wage and sustain their families. Many companies resorted to
downsizing to increase profits or to survive in a more
competitive environment. IBM laid off more than half its
workforce in the 1990s. Millions of families reported a negative
savings rate, and consumer debt rose rapidly. Such people
proved to be vulnerable to bankruptcies when another economic
downturn began in 2000.
During the peak years of the new economy, a 10-by-30-mile
strip of Santa Clara County, California, located about 50 miles
south of San Francisco, a region that until the 1960s had been
noted for its luscious fruits and vegetables, became the center of
the microelectronics industry. In this “Silicon Valley,” the
consumer electronics revolution that had originated in the 1970s
created a vast web of hundreds of high-tech firms that
manufactured, distributed, or “processed” new information
technologies.
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6. Silicon Valley attracted extensive media attention, which
reinforced its popular image as a place were brilliant, hard-
driving entrepreneurs founded companies that churned out
technological marvels and accumulated great personal fortunes.
America had not seen anything like this generation of electronic
buccaneers since the industrial revolution of the 1880s and
1890s. Silicon Valley and the other regions within the United
States where high- tech companies flourished were also plugged
into the rapidly expanding global economy.
U.S. companies competed fiercely with their rivals in Japan,
Taiwan, and Korea. Silicon Valley also reflected the growing
multiculturalism of American society. One-third of the
engineers and technical personnel developing the software and
hardware driving the new economy were people of Chinese or
Indian descent, many of them recent immigrants to America.
In the summer of 1997, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Korea,
Indonesia, and several other Asian countries experienced
turmoil in their financial markets that abruptly reversed years of
robust economic growth and rising prosperity. Asian financial
disasters drove stock values down and devalued currencies. It
also brought many large banks and corporations to the verge of
bankruptcy. Several nations received financial assistance from
the International Monetary Fund and were forced to implement
harsh austerity programs to stop the financial hemorrhaging.
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These financial and economic crises deepened the long
recession that had already engulfed Japan and threatened to
slow the Chinese juggernaut. In September 1998 Russia verged
on financial collapse. Even the U.S. powerhouse felt the effects
of the Asian meltdown and the Russian collapse. Businesses that
sold goods and services on Asian markets were hurt. U.S.

7. farmers who sold grain and beef to Asians were especially hard
hit. The crisis cost 250,000 American jobs.
CABLE TV AND THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
The electronic technologies of the late twentieth century
changed the way millions of Americans lived, worked, and
thought. The revolution in telecommunications created the
global information superhighway. The arrival of cable and
satellite television in the 1990s offered viewers greatly
expanded programming choices. Videocassette recorders
(VCRs) allowed viewers to schedule program watching to suit
their daily routines. By the mid- 1990s, the rental and sale of
movie videos to home viewers became the main source of profit
for Hollywood movie studios.
Television came to dominate political campaigning in the
1990s. Politicians raised and spent huge sums of money
advertising themselves, their parties, and their programs. They
also spent huge sums on negative political advertisements,
attacking their opponents. They hired staffs of consultants, who
focused on their candidates’ television images. A new
generation of wealthy, telegenic candidates sought election as
governors, senators, and presidents. The chief prerequisites for
many political offices came to be, “Can he or she project a
positive, voter-friendly image?” and “Can he or she raise the
large amount of money required for seeking political offices?”
The most significant electronic development was the creation of
cyberspace, that abstract conceptual region occupied by people
linked via global computer networks. The Net grew out of
America’s hysterical reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in
1957. President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research and
Design Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of
Defense to ensure that U.S. scientists retained their lead over
Soviet scientists in developing new technologies applicable to
the military. ARPA scientists also turned their attention to
computer networking and communications. They sought ways of
linking universities, defense contractors, and military command
centers in order to promote development of new weapons

8. systems and to sustain vital communication pathways in the
event of nuclear attacks. They developed a network, called
ARPANET, which went online in 1969. ARPANET linked giant
computers housed at four universities: the University of
California–Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford, the University of
Southern California (USC), and the University of Utah.
By the early 1970s, ARPANET was reaching beyond its Cold
War origins. More and more users were going online;
nonmilitary researchers were developing competing systems of
communications. New computer languages were created that
made communication among the proliferating networks difficult
if not impossible. In 1974 Robert Kahn and Vincent Cerf, two
ARPA computer scientists, developed the Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a uniform communications
language (or protocol) that allowed all the existing
communication networks to function and communicate as a
single meta-network. The creation of TCP/IP set the stage for
the rapid expansion of the Internet.
When inexpensive personal computers, which were capable of
linking to the worldwide telecommunications network, came
online in the 1980s, the number of people entering cyberspace
increased exponentially. Commercial providers such as
CompuServe began making ARPANET accessible to people who
were outside the university–military research nexus. The
creation of the World Wide Web (Internet) and the development
of inexpensive browser technologies in the early 1990s made
the information superhighway accessible to millions around
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the globe. The World Wide Web was the creation of Tim
Berners-Lee, who invented hypertext, a computer language that

9. facilitated the interactive exchange of text and graphic images.
As the twentieth century ended, more than half of all U.S.
households had at least one computer and most public schools
were online. These new information technologies created an
international media community. Telecommunications had
become an integral part of the global economy.
MULTICULTURALISM
Driven mainly by the rights-conscious efforts of second-
generation immigrants, particularly middle-class Hispanic
Americans and Asian Americans, increasing numbers of ethnic
groups organized to protest against what they perceived to be
their marginalization in American life and against the negative
stereotyping of their cultures they saw in films, television, and
advertisements. High school and college course offerings
became contested arenas. Newly empowered advocates for
women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian
Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, and
fundamentalist religious groups demanded that high schools and
colleges revise their curricula. Multiculturalists challenged
Anglocentric course reading lists. Literary scholars revised
reading lists to include works by women, persons of color, and
Third World writers. Historians hastened to rewrite textbooks to
include previously neglected or excluded groups.
Historically dispossessed and disadvantaged groups celebrated
their unique cultural identities while expressing powerful
resentments whose origins dated back hundreds of years to the
European conquest of Native Americans and enslavement of
Africans in America. In 1999, more than 2 million people
identified themselves as Native Americans, more than twice the
1970 total. This figure reflected not only a natural increase in
the Amerindian population but also the growing numbers of
people of mixed-race ancestry eager to affirm their ethnic roots.
A network of tribal-controlled colleges and universities
provided Native Americans with relevant education and cultural
sustenance. Many tribes energetically pursued various business
ventures, from growing wild rice to operating gambling casinos.

10. In August 1998, near New London, Connecticut, on
Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation land, the 550 surviving
Pequots, grown rich on profits from their Foxwood Casino
complex, proudly unveiled a magnificent museum and research
center. The museum, built at a cost of nearly $200 million,
celebrated the resurrection of a once- powerful Native American
people who had struggled for centuries to survive at the margins
of the dominant European society that had nearly obliterated
them during the seventeenth century.
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Multiculturalist reforms provoked a backlash. For many
conservatives, multiculturalism replaced Communism as the
nation’s most dangerous enemy. They insisted that these efforts
at more inclusive scholarship eroded any sense of a shared
national identity. Critics feared that all the counting by race,
ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, age, and religious
affiliation could lead to a Balkanization of American society.
They worried lest identity politics destroy the basic unity of the
most successful pluralistic society in world history.
Another multicultural controversy flared in the 1990s over the
legal recognition of marriage for same-sex couples. In May
1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that the laws barring
marriages between same-sex couples were unconstitutional.
Responding to the court’s decision, Republican congressmen,
fearing that if any state recognized same-sex marriages, all the
other states would be forced to recognize these marriages as
legal, sponsored federal legislation that would deny recognition
of these unions. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense
of Marriage Act, which specified that gay couples would be
ineligible for spousal benefits. Over thirty states, including
Hawaii, enacted similar legislation. Vermont, alone of the fifty
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recognized “civil unions” between same-sex couples, allowing
them to receive most of the legal benefits of marriage.
Like many other struggles over cultural change, multicultural
battles subsided during the late 1990s. Surveys revealed that
most middle-class Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity,
embraced a set of core values: maintaining a democratic
political culture, working hard, and an emphasis on individual
achievement. As the century drew to a close, they appeared to
accept the diversity that defined the American multicultural
society.
CULTURE WARRIORS
Conservative culture warriors advanced two theses: America
was in decline, and liberals caused the culture wars that were
rending the nation. These conservatives, many of them on the
religious Right, felt marginalized by liberalizing cultural
changes, and they were outraged by what appeared to them to be
an ever-expanding list of evils such as sexual immorality,
violent crime, pornography, and drug and alcohol abuse.
Not all the critiques of cultural trends during the 1990s
emanated from the Right. Liberals and Centrists identified
different indicators of decline: conspicuous consumption, rising
inequality, and a loss of community. These liberal critics feared
that unbridled individualism was undermining Americans’
grassroots activism. Affluent Americans were retreating into
gated communities. People were becoming more isolated and
detached from community concerns.
Culture wars over art in the 1990s, which got extensive media
coverage, were particularly nasty. The National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA) funded two photographic exhibits that touched
off fierce controversy. One of these exhibits featured a
photograph of a crucifix in a jar of the photographer’s urine.

12. The other showed an image of the Virgin Mary that had been
turned into a tie rack.
Art critics and museum curators defended the exhibits either as
imaginative creations or as free expression that must never be
censored. Many powerful congressmen, mostly Republicans, but
also some liberal Democrats, denounced the exhibits as a misuse
of public funds to support trash masquerading as art.
Congressional conservatives tried to eliminate the NEA, but it
managed to survive on much-reduced funding. Congress also
mandated a series of reforms, the most important of which
abolished NEA grants to individual artists and required that all
grants for projects be clearly spelled out in the initial
application.
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Two other cultural battles during the 1990s were over the way
American history was remembered. Conservative culture
warriors attacked what they called the “politically correct” or
“pc” approaches to U.S. history advanced by liberal elites out of
touch with mainstream Americans. The first involved a museum
exhibit entitled “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of
the Frontier, 1820–1920” staged at the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Museum of Art. It represented a modest effort to
present more realistic images of how Euro-Americans exploited
Native Americans during the exploration and settlement of the
West. It was too much for many people to accept, and they
protested. A few GOP senators threatened to cut the museum’s
budget.
The second controversy erupted when the National Air and
Space Museum planned a major exhibit that would feature the
Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb that
destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Conservative political leaders,
joined by veterans groups, protested the planned exhibit when
they learned that it would question the decision to drop the
bomb. The project director was forced out, and the exhibit was

13. drastically redesigned.
When it opened, the exhibit featured the aircraft with no
interpretive commentary.
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Conservative culture warriors also protested the spread of
“political correctness” to many elite college and university
campuses. At some institutions of higher learning, in an effort
to promote tolerance, liberal administrators promulgated
detailed codes of speech and conduct. Some of these codes
targeted “hate speech” that students were accused of using
toward women, gays and lesbians, and minorities of color. Some
professors expressed dismay at working in repressive
environments in which newly empowered champions of
multiculturalism and “politically correct” speech imposed a new
bureaucratic orthodoxy that encouraged an aggressively
litigious culture of victimization.
Some of these cultural battles exposed intense regional and
class divisions within the nation. Cultural conservatism
appealed most notably to working-class white people inhabiting
the South, the Plains states, and the Rocky Mountain states.
Liberal cultural ideas mostly appealed to well-educated
professionals on the East and West Coasts and to the elites who
inhabited the metropolitan centers of the East and Midwest.
The culture wars, waged fiercely in the early and mid-1990s,
always exaggerated by the media, abated somewhat in the later
years of the decade. The influence of the Religious Right
diminished, although it remained a cultural and political force,
especially in the South. These conflicts had always been waged
by engaged partisans of the Left and Right with the great mass
of ordinary Americans who occupied a vast middle ground
paying scant attention to the controversies.

14. As the 1990s wound down, it appeared that liberals were
winning many of the culture wars. Many Americans,
particularly younger Americans, had become more accepting of
changing mores in clothes, hairstyling, and piercing and
tattooing bodies. They also became more tolerant of a range of
personal behaviors, including sexual practices, marriage and
divorce, and family life. The permissiveness that had first
manifested itself in the 1960s had permeated the culture by the
1990s. Conservative culture warriors ultimately failed to
reverse these long-term cultural trends.
This was surely the case for ongoing family trends. High
divorce rates, later-age marriages, and cohabitation combined to
render the traditional nuclear family—married couples with
children—just one of a variety of family styles. There were no
longer any cultural norms.
Statistical data from the 2000 census confirmed these trends.
Almost a quarter of America’s adult population had never
married. Married couples headed approximately half of
American households. Households headed by a single female
with children under age eighteen accounted for 22 percent of all
families with children of that age.
Liberal and conservative critics of popular culture agreed that
there had been an egregious decline in standards and taste
during the 1990s. Commercialized sex was rampant, and often
very profitable. Surveys showed that two-thirds of late-night
television shows had some sexual content including simulated
intercourse. The “adult entertainment industry” took in billions
of dollars annually during the decade. The “gross-out” capacity
of popular culture made a quantum leap. Rappers vied with one
another in the use of offensive language and misogyny. The
Jerry Springer Show, a popular afternoon television talk show,
featured a succession of guests who humiliated themselves
before large audiences. Fights between enraged guests, whether
staged or not, enlivened the action and significantly increased
the number of viewers.

15. Sex and violence increasingly dominated television programs
and movies. The violent world of televised professional
wrestling attracted massive audiences. Huge, powerful men,
often amped on steroids, engaged in nonstop mayhem for the
amusement of crowds who knew that the matches were scripted.
Cops, featuring police videos of real chases, fights, wrecks, and
arrests, was a long-running popular television show of the era.
Local television news focused on live-action coverage of car
wrecks, crime scenes, raging fires, and storm damages. News
directors instructed their staffs: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Hollywood released films saturated with computerized special
effects, blaring sound
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tracks, violent action, profanity, nudity, and “gross-out” humor.
(Scatalogical jokes were the favorites of adolescent boys who
made up the largest part of the film-going audience.)
Even as pundits of both Left and Right continued to
characterize television as a cultural wasteland and corrupter of
young people, it was evident in the nineties, as in earlier eras,
that discerning viewers could find many well-crafted shows
such as The Cosby Show and Frasier to watch. Sports coverage
improved, and significant annual events such as the NCAA
College Basketball Tournament, the World Series, and the Super
Bowl attracted large audiences and generated billions of dollars
of advertising revenue.
Hollywood produced a large number of films enjoyed by
moviegoers of all ages: historical epics, spy thrillers, and
romantic comedies with the inevitable happy endings.
Hollywood also brought out numerous serious films such as
Rain Man, a well-crafted story starring Dustin Hoffman and

16. Tom Cruise about an autistic man with extraordinary cognitive
abilities and a materialistic striver who find their common
humanity. Steven Spielberg directed Schindler’s List, a film
about a German businessman who employed Jews in his factory
in Poland to save hundreds of people who would otherwise have
perished in Nazi death camps during World War II. Woody
Allen, the quirky, angst-ridden independent filmmaker,
produced a solid body of work throughout the 1990s, the best of
which was Bullets Over Broadway, a comedic treatment of the
Jazz Age. Art cinemas survived in New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles, and San Francisco, showing mostly foreign films that
appealed to sophisticated cinephiles.
High culture was alive and well in America in the 1990s.
American corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals
lavishly funded the world’s most extensive cultural
infrastructure. Museums, art galleries, opera companies,
repertory theaters, and symphony orchestras flourished mostly
in the large urban centers. Millions of well-educated affluent
Americans made up the large appreciative audiences for
accomplished artistic and literary performers.
BLACK AND WHITE, BUT NOT TOGETHER
In the mid-1990s, African Americans remained divided along
class lines. At one end of the social spectrum, a large and
growing class of black professionals and businesspeople
enjoyed affluent lifestyles. In 1998, 12 percent of college
students were black, roughly equal to their ratio of the general
population. In 1998, nearly half of African Americans in the
workforce held white-collar, middle-class jobs. At the other end
of the spectrum could be found the impoverished inner-city
blacks, representing one-third of the African American
270
population of approximately 30 million. The poorest of the
poor, representing perhaps 10 percent of the African American
population in 1998, comprised the “underclass.”

17. Although intact families, thriving churches, and other strong
institutions could be found in the inner city, this culture of
decency often was overwhelmed by a staggering array of social
pathologies. As factory jobs once open to urban workers
disappeared, inner-city unemployment rates soared. With good
jobs no longer available locally, young people faced life on
mean streets or held marginal service-sector jobs in car washes
or fast-food restaurants. Inner-city pathologies such as high
crime rates, drug abuse, welfare dependency, and teenage
pregnancies derived from more fundamental problems: lack of
good educational and job opportunities.
Festering ethnic antagonisms exploded in May 1992, when a
California jury acquitted four white police officers charged with
savagely beating an African American suspect, Rodney King. A
bystander had videotaped the incident, and portions of the tape
were repeatedly broadcast. To nearly all who observed the
gruesome sequences, the television camera presented
compelling images of police brutality. The verdict to acquit the
four policemen, rendered by a politically
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conservative suburban jury containing no African American
members, ignited the most violent race riot in the nation’s
history, which swept through South Central Los Angeles.
Thousands of businesses were looted, and many of them were
burned. Fifty-four people were killed, and thousands were
injured. Property losses reached $850 million.
The Los Angeles police, poorly led and confused, were initially
slow to respond to the riot, and events spun out of control.
National Guard troops were rushed to Los Angeles to quell the
rioters. Before order was restored and peace returned,

18. approximately 12,000 people were arrested for looting and
arson, most of them young black and Hispanic males.
The riot was reminiscent of the 1965 Watts upheaval, but there
were significant differences. The 1965 riot had pitted blacks
against whites. The 1992 riot had much more complex ethnic
dynamics, reflecting the ethno-racial diversity of the nation’s
second-largest city. One observer called it the nation’s first
“multicultural riot.” Blacks attacked other blacks as well as
whites. Hispanics attacked whites. Blacks and Hispanics both
attacked Asians. Gangs of African American and Hispanic thugs
also engaged in violence and looting. These violent actions
exposed the deep divisions and animosities among various
groups. The division was sharpest between whites and various
minorities. An affluent West Side white woman stated, “We
don’t know and don’t care about the problems of the inner cities
… most of us don’t even know where South Central is ….” The
King verdict obviously triggered the riot, but the underlying
causes appeared to be a potent mix of ethno-racial antagonisms,
poverty, and neglect, all exacerbated by a severe economic
recession that hit poor people, working-class people, and small
business owners especially hard.
In 1995, an ironic sequel to the Rodney King case occurred.
From January to October, a former star athlete turned TV
sportscaster, film actor, and rent-a-car pitchman, O. J. Simpson,
stood trial for the murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown
Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. After a lengthy trial,
a jury acquitted Simpson of all charges.
271
FIGURE 16.1 Soldiers of the California National Guard holding
a group of young rioters in South Central Los Angeles, May

19. 1992.
Source: José Ivey.
(
271
)
272
Because of the political and cultural contexts in which the trial
occurred, it acquired a significance that far transcended the
guilt or innocence of one prominent individual. All of the major
media provided constant coverage of the trial for months. Cable
TV watchers could catch analyses and perspectives on the trial
from ex-prosecutors and ex-defense lawyers. Millions of
Americans became personally involved in the “trial of the
century.” Attorneys for both sides and the judge, Lance Ito,
often played to the ever-present television cameras. Due process
became judicial theater and Hollywood showbiz. A brutal
double murder became sensational prime-time entertainment.
In the eyes of a substantial majority of viewers and expert
commentators, prosecutors presented a strong case based on
physical evidence that implicated Simpson beyond a reasonable
doubt in the two murders. The fact that Simpson, whose
resources matched those that Los Angeles County could allocate
for the trial, could afford a battery of high- priced attorneys to
mount a successful defense proved to many Americans that he
was immune to the justice system. Simpson’s acquittal also
reinforced the widely held notion that there was one standard of
justice for the rich and another, harsher standard for the poor.
The antics of the attorneys on both sides, the often erratic
behavior of Judge Ito, and most of all the outcome of the trial
suggested to many observers that the U.S. system of criminal
justice had produced a farcical miscarriage of justice. The trial
also raised an ominous question: Maybe the traditional jury
system did not work in a racially polarized society?

20. Looming over the trial was the ugly reality of racism. Because
the murder victims, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald
Goldman, were white, and because Simpson was a black
celebrity, racial attitudes in this country became central to the
outcome of the trial and the way people viewed that outcome.
The jury, consisting of nine African Americans, eight of them
women; a Hispanic male; and two white women, reached a
verdict of acquittal within four hours. The jurors rushed to
judgment without seriously considering the evidence, much of it
quite complex and technical, presented by 133 witnesses who
testified during the long trial.
The black–white racial chasm that existed in this country was
highlighted on October 4, 1995, when the clerk of the court read
the jury’s verdict. Around the country, wherever crowds of
black Americans had gathered to hear the verdict, they cheered
loudly and hugged each other at what appeared to them to be a
triumphal deliverance. Wherever crowds of whites had gathered
to hear the verdict, they stared in disbelief at what appeared to
them to be an awful miscarriage of justice. Polls showed that 87
percent of black
Americans agreed with the jury’s verdict; 65 percent of whites
believed Simpson to be guilty as charged. These numbers
dramatically revealed that white and black Americans stared
uncomprehendingly at each other from across a vast cultural
divide.
Seemingly lost in all of the furor over the verdict of acquittal
was the fact that Simpson still faced civil suits brought by the
families of the murder victims accusing him of the “wrongful
deaths” of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. On
February 4, 1997, in a civil trial conducted in a West Los
Angeles courtroom before a mostly white, middle-class jury that
did not include a single African American, in which a stern
judge excluded the television cameras and kept a rigid order,
Simpson was convicted of being responsible for the “wrongful
deaths” of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The

21. survivors were awarded a total of $33.4 million in compensatory
and punitive damages. There was far less media coverage of the
civil trial and little noticeable public reaction to the verdicts.
Two weeks after the conclusion of the first Simpson trial,
another dramatic event accentuated the black–white racial
divide rending the American social fabric. The controversial
leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, led a “Million
Man March” on Washington, D.C. About
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272
)
500,000 black men gathered on the mall in front of the
Washington Monument. For the huge gathering, it was a day of
atonement and renewal and an affirmation of their black
manhood. For most of the participants, it was a deeply moving
experience.
The publicity generated by the arrest of Rodney King, the riot,
and O. J. Simpson’s trial, all highlighted the continuing ethno-
racial divide and also called attention to some troubling aspects
of the American criminal justice system. More than 6 million
people were either on probation or serving time in prisons in
1999, triple the number in 1980. Ethnic and racial minorities
accounted for more than two-thirds of the inmates, even though
they made up 25 percent of the total population. The huge
increase in the number of people on probation and in prison
was attributed mainly to the stepped-up war on drugs. Even
though studies showed that approximately 80 percent of cocaine
users were white and blacks constituted perhaps 12 percent of
drug users, African Americans made up over 50 percent of all
people arrested for drug possession.
Despite the high rates of arrests and incarcerations of African
Americans, experts assessing the status of black people during

22. the nineties identified several indicators of progress. Polls
showed that many white people expressed more liberal racial
attitudes. Middle-class African Americans were also gratified
that affirmative action policies had survived the backlash and
were in place in major corporations and elite universities. Black
people took pride in the successful military careers achieved by
those who took advantages of opportunities available to them in
America’s most integrated institution. African American
political leaders won mayoralty elections in several major cities
that did not have black- majority populations, including New
York, Minneapolis, and Denver.
Most important, black people made economic gains during the
1990s. Median household income rose more rapidly for blacks
than for whites. Income for African American married couples,
which had been about two-thirds of income for white married
couples, rose to nearly 90 percent during the 1990s. At the other
end of the income spectrum, black poverty declined rapidly
during the decade. One-third of black families were officially
defined as poor in 1990. By the end of the era, it had declined
to about a fifth of all black families.
However, persisting conditions ensured that black–white
relations remained the nation’s most profound socioeconomic
problem. The greatest obstacle to progress was the enduring
power of social class, more powerful than race. While middle-
class blacks made significant progress in the 1990s, and the
number of poor black families living in poverty was much
reduced; the average net worth of African American families
declined relative to that of whites. The poverty rate for blacks
in 2000 was nearly three times what it was for whites.
273
Unemployment rates for black people remained more than twice
as high for whites. African Americans were far more likely than
whites to lack health insurance and far more likely to not know
that they were eligible for means-tested programs such as food

23. stamps or Medicaid. Life expectancy of blacks lagged well
behind that of whites in 2000. It was 71.2 years for African
Americans, 77.4 years for white people.
The most serious of the many problems afflicting poor black
families was the worrisome issue of child poverty. In 2000,
nearly one-third of African American children under the age of
eighteen resided in a poor household. Like the children in low-
income white families, poor black children had serious health
problems including high rates of asthma, diabetes, and learning
disabilities.
Inner-city public schools continued to face formidable
obstacles. Continuing residential segregation combined with
Supreme Court decisions to resegregate public education during
the 1990s. Far fewer black students attended public schools that
were 50 percent or more white in
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273
)
2000 than in the early 1970s. Because of the high concentration
of African Americans in many large cities of the North and
Midwest, segregated schools were more common in the North
than in the South. Similar trends toward greater school
segregation also separated Hispanic Americans from whites.
The education most Latino and black youngsters received in
these segregated schools was generally inferior. Per-pupil
funding for predominantly black and Latino inner-city schools
was usually much lower than for the mostly white schools in the
suburbs. Substantial black–white and Hispanic–white gaps in
achievement test scores persisted, and they widened in the
1990s. Two long-standing trends also persisted during the
decade: The lower the social class of the student, the lower the
test score, and African American and Hispanic students had

24. considerably lower median test scores than whites at every level
of social class. How to close or at least narrow these class and
ethnoracial gaps in test scores continued to challenge the best
efforts of reformers, educators, psychologists, and parents as
the twentieth century drew to a close.
HISPANIC AMERICANS
In 1998 the nation’s 23 million Hispanics represented America’s
fastest-growing minority. Hispanic Americans comprised a
diverse group. They included 16 million Mexican Americans,
concentrated in California and in the American Southwest; 1
million Cuban Americans, most living in south Florida; and
between 1 million and 2 million immigrants from the Caribbean
region and Central America, living mostly on the East Coast or
in California. The Hispanic American population also included
2 million Puerto Ricans, who were American citizens by birth.
Most Hispanics, regardless of their national origins, immigrated
to America in search of a better life for themselves and their
families. Millions have found success. Family, church, and
cultural institutions have sustained hard-working people in
America. But life remained harsh for millions of Hispanic
families. In 1998, 20 percent of Mexican Americans and one-
third of Puerto Ricans lived in poverty. Hispanic communities
often were devastated by alcohol and drug abuse, soaring crime
rates, and high rates of school dropouts and teenage
pregnancies.
As American society fragmented in the 1980s and 1990s, the
ideal of a common national culture proved to be ever more
elusive. Americans appeared to share mainly consumerist
experiences, such as shopping at malls and watching prime-time
television programs and sporting events. To many immigrant
families, becoming an American was defined primarily
274
in residential and economic terms: reside in the United States,
get a good education, and get a well-paying job. Earn money,

25. accumulate wealth, buy a home in the suburbs, provide well for
your family, and join the higher echelons of the consumer
republic. Questions of politics and culture were downplayed.
ASIAN AMERICANS
Fed by continuing high rates of immigration, the Asian
American and Pacific Islander populations continued to grow
rapidly during the decade of the 1990s. People from Korea, the
Philippines, Vietnam, and China continued to come to the
United States in large numbers. In 1998, 11 percent of Los
Angeles’s 3.5 million residents were Asians.
Strengthened by family cultures and prizing academic success,
Asian Americans showed high rates of college attendance and
upward mobility. However, Asian American communities
experienced generational tensions as young people got caught
between the tug of traditional ways and the lure of American
popular culture.
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274
)
275
FIGURE 16.2 (a) Distribution of Hispanic population in the
United States. (b) Distribution of Asian population in the
United States.
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275
)
276
WOMEN AND WORK
By the late 1990s, women had smashed through many sexist

26. barriers in higher education and in the workplace. In many
fields that had long been virtually closed to women, such as
medicine, law, engineering, and business management, large
numbers energetically pursued productive careers. There were
also large increases in the number of women holding public
office in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996, the number of working
mothers with children exceeded the number of mothers with
children not working outside of the home. In 1998, one-fourth
of all doctors and lawyers were women. By 1999, women
constituted almost half of the total workforce.
But as increasing numbers of women moved into formerly male-
dominated occupations and professions, disparities continued in
the pay women received for performing comparable work.
Women who worked full-time in 1999 earned about 73¢ for
every dollar a man earned. Many working-class women still
confronted a segregated job market in the late 1990s. Sixty
percent of working women held “pink-collar” jobs. Many
women who had reached managerial positions in business in the
late 1990s felt that they were paying too high a personal price
for their professional successes. Others complained that they
could not fulfill family obligations at home and perform their
jobs at the highest levels.
Long-term structural changes in the economy adversely affected
working women. The rise of service industries and the
implementation of new technologies created millions of new
jobs for women but also created new limits and liabilities.
Automated offices became the sweatshops of the 1990s. Many
businesses, to cut costs, hired part-time and temporary clerical
workers. These contingent workers typically received lower pay
and fewer benefits than full-timers.
Cultural changes also have accompanied the advent of women
into the workplaces of America. Most notable was the change in
women’s consciousness. Many women in the late 1990s felt that
they were equal to men in the marketplace and had greater
ambitions and expectations than previous generations of women.
But traditional values and stereotypes also exhibited strong

27. staying powers. Advertisers no longer celebrated domesticity as
a woman’s only appropriate realm, but they still advised the
successful female professional to keep her weight down and be
attractive. Women spent far more of their incomes on clothes,
beauty aids, cosmetic surgeries, diet, and exercise programs
than men.
Connections: Sources Online
READ AND REVIEW
Review this chapter by using the study aids and these related
documents and resources available on MySearchLab.
Study and Review Chapter Test Essay Test
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276
)
277Read the Document
Howard Rheingold, Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
(1993) Cecelia Rosa Avila, Third Generation Mexican American
(1988) Jesse Jackson, Common Ground (1988)
Elaine Bell Kaplan, “Talking to Teen Mothers” (1995)
RESEARCH AND EXPLORE
View the Image
Sign at a Gay Pride March
Brief Bibliographic Essay
William L. O’Neill, A Bubble in Time: America during the
Interwar Years, 1989–2001 is a fine recent informative and
entertaining book, which identifies the major political, social,
cultural, and ideological trends shaping that particular decade.
James T. Patterson, Restless Giant, Chapters and are concerned
with culture wars, multiculturalism, and black–white race

28. relations. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to
Define America is the best study of those cultural battles. David
Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism makes
the case that most middle-class Americans embrace common
core values and have accepted the diversity multiculturalism is
promoting without undermining our basic cultural unity. Ellis
Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class
Blacks Angry? is an important and disturbing book. See William
Wei’s The Asian American Movement for study of a large,
diverse group of Americans who are making rapid gains in
education, wealth, and influence. For the matter of women’s pay
issues, see Sara M. Evans and Barbara J. Nelson’s Wage
Justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic
Reform. On contemporary drug problems plaguing Americans,
see Erich Goode’s Drugs in American Society.
OCT 18 – W8 : D1
Writing and APA-style
Announcements & Today’s Agenda
• Discuss proposal changes and reasons why
• Writing guides and tips
• APA style
• Full example of an Introduction/Literature Review
Changes to Proposal paper
• You have figured out a topic area, research question, and

29. hypothesis you are
interested in
• Instead of a full research proposal, we’ll switch to:
• A literature review that ends with a hypothesis for a new study
to address issue you bring
up.
• The literature review and hypothesis will be the 8-10 page
paper
• Methods/Results/Implications/Discussion sections are no
longer necessary
• Can include if you would like to get feedback, but grade (and
page requirement) will be based on
the literature review
Changes to Proposal paper Cont’d
• Title page is still needed (with running head and page
numbers)
• Abstract is still needed (though will be shorter now).
• Still don’t need to add to paper until draft 2
• Draft 1 will still focus on big picture stuff
• Writing; organization; structure of content
• Draft 2 will still focus on organization, tone, and APA format
• Draft 3 will still focus on polishing
• 2-minute presentation still happening
• You will have two minutes to share relevant background,
issues or holes in the literature, what you

30. would test, and your specific hypothesis
• Presentations still need to be made without a script or notes
Changes to Proposal paper Cont’d
• Draft 1 is now due on OCT 25
• Turn in electronically (via Moodle)
• Feedback from me back by NOV 1
• Feedback in form of audio via Moodle
• Draft 2 is now due on NOV 10
• Turn in electronically (via Moodle)
• Feedback from peer review back by NOV 13
• Feedback in form of comments/edits from peers
• Draft 3 is now optional. If taking opportunity, due NOV 20
• Final draft is still due on DEC 6.
What Determines a Properly Written Paper?
• Content is the most important aspect of a well-written paper.
This includes:
• Clarity
• Conciseness
• Logical Progression of Ideas
• Accuracy
• Completeness of Ideas

31. Clarity
• Clarity includes using proper sentence structure and grammar.
The paper
should be easy to read and understand.
• A. “The participants included both male and female students
who were on
average 22 or 23 years old there was 15 male and seventeen
female.”
• B. “Participants included both male students (N=15) with a
mean age of 22
years and female students (N=17) with a mean age of 23 years.”
Conciseness
• Be concise and precise. Keep your word choices simple and
avoid flowery
phrases or padding. Use the least amount of words necessary to
get your
point across.
• A. “After giving the rats an unexpected shock, they appeared
terrified and
shrunk away from the once loved toy.”
• B. “After administration of the shock, the rats showed an
avoidance
response to the toy.”

32. Logical Progression of Ideas
• Present information in each section in a logical manner that is
easy to
follow. This is especially important in the Introduction and
Discussion
sections.
• Within each section, ideas should flow smoothly from one to
another,
without jumping back and forth.
Accuracy
• Present your results as well as the results of other researchers
in an
accurate manner.
• Correct: Smith et. al (2010) found that three year old boys
with ADHD
respond best to a combination of drug therapy and family
counseling.
• Incorrect: Smith et. al (2010) found that three year old
children with ADHD
respond best to combination therapy.
Completeness of Ideas
• Fully explore an idea before moving on to the next.
• Especially important in both the Introduction and Discussion
sections. Do not

33. inflate your Reference section by using brief statements that
just touch on an
idea.
Style
• Style is the second most important part of a properly written
paper.
• This is the technical aspect of the paper including how
reference citations
are handled, different sections of the paper, proper margins and
font, etc.
General Stylistic Guidelines
• Papers must be typed
• The entire paper must be double-spaced
• Use 1 inch margins on all sides
• Text is left-aligned with right edges ragged, not justified.
Stylistic Guidelines Cont’d
• Do not hyphenate words at the end of a line
• Use only Times New Roman 12 pt. font
• Single space after sentence terminators
• Indent 1/2 inch (5-7 spaces) except for: abstract, titles,
headings, and
subheadings, table titles, notes, and figure captions

34. Introduction
• Provides rationale for study and how it fits with previous
research
• Support the investigation of the hypothesis
• Think “funnel-shaped”
Introduction Cont’d
• Intro consists of:
• Introduction of the problem
• Why is it important?
• Relevant literature
• Major findings, methodological issues, and major conclusions
• Hypotheses and how they connect to the literature
Introduction Format
• Intro starts on new page after abstract
• Put the paper title centered at top
• Follow with the text (indent)
• Place page # and running head on all pages
• Put in header
Introduction Guidelines
• First 1-2 paragraphs – Broad Intro
• Develop the background for the hypothesis

35. • Inform the reader about the field of research addressed
• Body of Intro
• Present relevant literature
• Summarize articles in a few sentence
• One paragraph per idea
Intro Guidelines Cont’d
• Purpose & Hypothesis
• Present purpose
• Present research issue
• Explain why it is necessary
• Then, specify hypothesis
Citations in Text
• When you use another person’s words or ideas in your paper
you must
acknowledge them with a proper citation.
1. Embedded
• Statistics is fun (Smith, 2005).
2. In-text
• Smith (2005) noted that statistics is fun.
3. In-text
• In 2005, Smith noted that statistics is fun.
- Following the first in-text citation of an author, it is not
necessary to give the year again,

36. within the same paragraph.
Citations
• Basics:
• Include the author and the date
• Quotations:
• Include the page number (p. #) or paragraph (para. #)
• Paraphrasing:
• Just include author and date – page number *can* be included
but is not necessary
Citations Cont’d
• Two authors:
• List both in same order as listed in article.
• Use both names for all references.
• Use “and” when part of text, and “&” when in parenthetical
citations
• Smith and Doe (2007) found that…
• However, one study found null results…(Smith & Doe, 2007).
Citations Cont’d
• Three to five authors:
• List all author in order for the first time the citation appears.
• After, use just the first author and “et al.”

37. • Weal, Smith, Tougas, and Scott (2002)…
• This theory was supported by a later study…(Weal, Smith,
Tougas, & Scott, 2002)
• However, the study did not support the second hypothesis
(Weal et al., 2002)
• NOTE: Do not reorganize the names within a given article.
They are in that order for a reason.
Citations Cont’d
• Six or more authors:
• Use only the first author’s name followed by “et al.”
• Harrison et al. (2004) contradicted these findings…
Citations Cont’d
• Secondary source citations must be distinguished:
• Statistics is fun (Stark, as cited in Crawford, 2003)
• NOTE: Only the Crawford paper will appear in the reference
section.
Citations Cont’d
• Two or more works in the same citation:
• List the works alphabetically, separated by a semi-colon.
• …this is supported my multiple studies (Adams, 2005;
Wesson, 1996).
• Two or more works by same author in citation:

38. • Arrange by year of publication
• Past research (Gogel, 1984, 1990)…
• Two authors with the same last name:
• Use the author’s initials to distinguish the two
• A. M. Smith (1987) and B. D. Smith (1992)…
RQ Running example
• RQ = How do women and men differ in their perceptions of
sexual
harassment?
• Hypothesis = Women will be more likely than men to perceive
incidents of
sexual harassment as sexual harassment. In addition, women
will be more
likely to perceive incidents of sexual harassment when the
victim is a woman
than a man.
Check point
• Hypothesis = Women will be more likely than men to perceive
incidents of
sexual harassment as sexual harassment. In addition, women
will be more
likely to perceive incidents of sexual harassment when the
victim is a woman
than a man.

39. • IVs:
• A: P gender + sexual harassment or not
• B: Victim gender + number of incidents
• C: Perceptions of sexual harassment + P gender
• D: P gender + Victim gender
Check point
• Hypothesis = Women will be more likely than men to perceive
incidents of
sexual harassment as sexual harassment. In addition, women
will be more
likely to perceive incidents of sexual harassment when the
victim is a woman
than a man.
• DV:
• A: # of perceived incidents
• B: negative perception toward sexual harassment
• C: perceiving sexual harassment
• D: manipulation of victim gender
Introduction
• Sexual harassment is a widespread phenomenon.
• What is sexual harassment?
• Weird kid examples
• “Nutt checking” à yet, “No homo”
• Grabbing rear
• Pinching breast

40. • Research à factors accounting for occurrence of sexual
harassment, and
factors influencing perceptions about sexual harassment.
Intro Cont’d
• Research has shown:
• More women, over men, have reported being sexually harassed
• Women are more likely to label sexual harassment as such,
and to react to instances of
sexual harassment
• White women are more likely than women of color to
acknowledge that they have been
harassed
• Studies conducted only in U.S.
• Studies (for the most part) only include instances of sexual
harassment between a man and a
woman
Intro Cont’d
• Most frequently occurring forms of sexual harassment for both
men and women are:
• Sexual jokes
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly84CagzobU
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHvLCY48krI
• Sexual looks
•

41. http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70126120&trkid=
3325854
• (Jackie Jormp Jormp, 12:50)
• Sexual gestures
• 7:04
• Harassment occurs more frequently between two co-workers
than between a supervisor
and his or her employee
• HOWEVER, the latter usually consists of the most severe
forms
• Sexual assault
• Rape
Intro Cont’d
• Sexually harassing behaviors are viewed to be most
unacceptable in female-dominated
work settings
• Physical incidents are viewed more negatively than non-
physical incidents
• Male perpetrators are generally perceived as more harassing
than female perpetrators
• Students are less likely to label scenarios as sexual harassment
than actual workers
Intro Cont’d
• Cuing individuals for sexual harassment increases the chances
that they will label it as such
• As scenarios depicting sexual harassment become more severe,

42. so does the tendency for
people to rate them as sexually harassing
Intro Cont’d
• People are MORE likely to identify a scenario as sexually
harassing when individuals have:
• More liberal attitudes toward women
• Low levels of religiosity
• An internal locus of control
Intro Cont’d
• People are LESS likely to judge something as sexual
harassment:
• If the “complainer” permitted the harassment
• When the accused is an average (versus above-average)
performer
• Normal, not threatening
• Amount of cosmetics used by the victim can result in an
attractiveness bias and affect people’s
perceptions regarding sexual harassment
Purpose of Current Study
• Research has focused on male-to-female sexual harassment
• What about different gender pairings?

43. • MF
• MM
• What about those judging the harassment?
Hypotheses!!
• Below are the hypotheses.
• H1: Main effect for participants’ sex. Females will report
higher scores on the
DVs than males.
• H2: Main effect for victims’ sex. The DVs scores will be
higher when the victim
is female than when the victim is male.
• H3: There will be an interaction between P’s sex and victim’s
sex. There will
be an effect on the DVs as a function of IV-1 depending on IV-
2.
Hi all: I have been thinking about the research proposal paper
and rethinking the purpose of the assignment. Based on what
students have been doing so far, I want to adjust the assignment
a bit. Below are the major changes. I will go over all of this in
more detail when I see you in class on Wednesday. You have all
put in a lot of work into your papers, and I am hoping these
changes will allow students to focus their ideas while practicing
writing skills.
1. The proposal will now be a literature review. Instead of a
formal proposal that includes all the sections noted in the

44. packet, students will write a literature review (think of this as a
longer "Background" section). The end of the review, though,
will still include your hypothesis/prediction for a new study.
2. Students will be responsible for providing information as to
what the literature says (and does not say) about their topic
area; providing details of studies and reviews as examples to
support arguments.
3. Given that the paper will now be a literature review, the
"method," "results," and "implication/discussion" sections ARE
NO LONGER NEEDED.
4. The deadlines for drafts will be changed. I will speak more
about this in class on Wednesday.
5. The deadline for the first draft is NO LONGER THIS
FRIDAY.
Hi Tony: I'm a bit confused about your study and proposed
hypothesis. First, the format of the assignment is not correct.
Please read the instructions and follow all direction from the
research proposal packet.
That aside, I'm not sure I understood your prediction. From my
reading, it seems as though you are interested in how
environmental factors influence development in children. There
actually has been lots of research on this. You mention that you
want to examine three risk factors; maternal education, maternal
depression, and socio-economic status. However, these aren't
necessarily environmental factors, especially if you focus on the
mother. You then switch gears and mention family financial
stability.
I'm confused as to what your focus is. Why not create a study in
which you look at family financial stability, emotional support,

45. access to resources, etc., and their relationship with child
mental development (by which you mean what, exactly?).
These ideas are still a bit broad and not necessarily testable.
Students need a testable hypothesis that can be examined in a
single study.
The potential study I mentioned above could work. How do you
feel about that idea?
Let me know if we need to meet about this. I'm concerned this
idea isn't concrete enough to start working on the draft.
I look forward to your response.
-Adrian
Impact of Environment on Child Development
Tony Shi
Psychology 101
10/4/2017

46. Impact of Environment on Child Development
My study of the whole subject of psychology has predisposed
me to a lot of information that pertain the relationship between
environment and its caretaker-the human being. Many scholars
and writers alike have discussed the psychological aspects that
are the connection therein a human surrounding and their
general conduct. While the likes of Babin, B. J., & Boles, J. S.
(1996) and Graham, J., & Haidt, J. (2010) have predicated their
research upon the environmental influences on the general
workplace and home behaviors of adults, Graham, J., & Haidt,
J. (2010) on the other hand underscores the need to understand
the correlation that lies in one's religious subscription and their
moral standings. Further interaction with research materials on
various aspects of psychology exposed me to many more pieces
of literature on psychology, and especially topics that
interrogate whether or not there is a relation between
environment and human character. However, while there are so
much research and submissions available on a myriad of
elements of psychology, there seems to be very little focus on
the influence an environment has on the development of a young
child. Based on the same premise, I took an interest in finding
out more about this area that many a scholar have not predicated
their time upon.
I would, therefore, like to focus my research on establishing the
possible bearing that a particular environment may have on a
child's development especially mentally. I plan to achieve the
objectives of my study through manipulation of two variants. In
the first instance, I will interrogate the growth and development
of children born and brought up in ideal environments. On the
flip side of the coin, I will again try to establish the outcomes
of children born and bred in compromised situations that do not
conform to bare minimum standards.

47. It is my prediction that the early surroundings of a child have
profound bearings on its general development and well-being.
The World Health Organization (2014) submits that right from
the infant stage; an inappropriate home environment has the
potential of tampering with the stress response system of the
brain alongside compromising the quality of care given to
children and consequent disruption of healthy development. The
little available research has established a link between adverse
home settings with problems such as retarded brain development
that consequently result in poor growth of language by the time
kids are three years old, aggression and depression as well as
impairment of cognitive development by their third birthday
(World Health Organization, 2014). Additionally, the brain
development of a child that happens within the first three years
has a significant bearing on their likelihood of graduating from
high school, teen parenthood and their employment and earnings
in adulthood.
Studies on brain imaging have suggested that disadvantaged
environments will have impacts on the brain development.
Growing up in localities that are plagued by poverty and turmoil
often leads to changes in the stress management system of the
brain, thereby predisposing children to chronic diseases in their
adult lives. Additionally, research undertaken on infants and
young children has laid particular bare patterns associated with
brain-behaviour (David, & Weinstein, 2013). These associations
exist in the aspects of socioeconomic statuses, language ability,
emotional development as well as learning and memory.
The discussion of impacts of the environment on child
development introduces an integral element called risk factor.
Scientifically, a risk factor refers to a condition that related to a
specific result (Evans, Li & Whipple, 2013). An example is
given in a case of two kids drawn from different economic
backgrounds. More often than not, children that grow up in
poverty are likely to be school dropouts unlike their well to do
counterparts. In this case, therefore, poverty becomes a risk
factor. In as much as not all poor children drop out of school,

48. they are perceived to be at risk because they possess higher
chances of falling victim to school dropout. Past studies have
come up with a child's environmental aspects known to have
outcomes in the later stages of life. These include poverty, low
maternal education and maternal depression. These three factors
remain to be the most reliable informers of outcomes in later
life such as cognitive development, emotional and social well-
being and academic performance (Evans, Li & Whipple, 2013).
It has also been established that such elements of risk can also
affect children even in their early developmental stages. For
instance, risk vulnerability in the infancy phase has detrimental
effects that lean more on a child's readiness for school than
exposure in teen or adult life.
The CANDLE study in relation to my hypothesis
CANDLE (Conditions Affecting Neurocognitive Development
and Learning in Early Childhood) is an underway research on
1500 women and their kids from Shelby County. Mothers are
enrolled into the study during their second trimester and remain,
participants of the same, until their children are three years of
age. The kind information collected by this research are various
developmental aspects that include nutrition, health,
psychosocial well-being and cognition functioning. On a general
note, it is essential to take note of the fact that the women under
study are similar to the larger population of mothers around
Shelby County. Trends established here can, therefore,
represent the reality on the ground (World Health Organization,
2014). Since that holds true, I, thus, seek to examine and
interrogate the presence and effects of the three significant risks
factors-low maternal education, maternal depression and
poverty or low income.
Economic Stability and Family income
The financial prowess of a family has a profound impact on the
development of children. Just like other risks, poverty affects
the development of children in that it dictates the environments

49. and resources made available to them during growth (Evans, Li
& Whipple, 2013). Differences in parenting are reported to
manifest early in the developmental stages of infants. For
instance, poor mothers are likely to be less affectionate and
responsive to distress signals of their young ones thereby
signaling harsh parenting (Evans, Li & Whipple, 2013). The
unresponsive nature of poor parents, coupled with less
stimulatory experiences that is a result of lack of learning
materials for low income parented children add to the grave
reality of maladjustments and lower cognitive scores compared
to those from well to families.
Relationship between well-educated parents and ideal home
environments
Parent's level of education has a significant impact on the
development of children. Other studies of child outcomes have
submitted that maternal education is more important than family
income. An increase in mother education translates to better
home environments for children's development. Educated
mothers help a grand deal children hailing from young,
disadvantaged or single parent families.
Maternal depression
According to Glover, (2014) the child bearing's most common
complication is the maternal postpartum depression. While most
mothers will experience brief depression sessions within the
first weeks after giving birth, 10 to 15 percent of first-time
mothers suffer significant miseries that span up to six months or
more. The disorder precipitates feelings of guilt, sleep
disturbances and loss of interest in routine activities. Depressed
mothers, therefore, are unlikely to provide the much-needed
care for their infants (Thompson, 2014) and their limited
interactions are often negative.

51. References
David, T. G., & Weinstein, C. S. (Eds.). (2013). Spaces for
children: The built environment and child development.
Springer Science & Business Media.
Evans, G. W., Li, D., & Whipple, S. S. (2013). Cumulative risk
and child development. Psychological Bulletin, 139(6), 1342.
Glover, V. (2014). Maternal depression, anxiety and stress
during pregnancy and child outcome; what needs to be
done. Best practice & research Clinical obstetrics &
gynaecology, 28(1), 25-35.
Thompson, R. A. (2014). Stress and child development. The
Future of Children, 24(1), 41-59.
World Health Organization. (2014). Social determinants of
mental health. World Health Organization.
!
1
PSYC101 – Introductory Psychology
Psychology Research Proposal Packet
Schedule/Table of Contents
Due Dates Assignment/Resource Pages

52. Research Proposal Overview 2-5
Grading Details 5
9/8 (Fri) Topics of Interest 6
9/18 (Mon) Articles of Interest + Research Questions 7-8
10/4 (Wed) Hypothesis + Summary Statement 9-10
10/20 (Fri) Draft #1 (put ID# on paper instead of name) 11-12
11/6 (Mon) Draft #2 (put ID# on paper instead of name) 13
11/20 (Mon) Draft #3 (put ID# on paper instead of name) 14
12/6 (Wed) Final Research Proposal (hard copy in class) 15
12/9 (Wed.) 2-minute Presentations 16
Writing and APA Style/Formatting Tips 17-18
Appendix A – Sample Outline 19-21
Appendix B – Proposal Grading Rubric 22
Appendix C – APA Formatting Guide 23-29

53. !
2
Research Proposal Overview
Psychology is a rich and interdisciplinary field that investigates
the underlying mechanisms
governing behavior and mental processes. Throughout the term,
you will develop a research
proposal for a study of your own design. You will not be
collecting real data, so the sky is the
limit for what you decide to study! With this proposal you will
have the opportunity to think like
a psychological scientist to review a body of psychology
literature of interest to you and propose
a correlation OR experiment to investigate an original research
question. There are a series of
exercises throughout the semester designed to help you along
the way. These exercises are
designed to move beginning scientific writers through the
process, but all students, regardless of
their level, can benefit from working from the ground up.
Learning Goals
1) Practice using clear scientific thinking to propose a study to
fill a current gap in the
scientific literature
2) Practice finding, comprehending, and synthesizing peer-
reviewed primary research
articles

54. 3) Develop an argument and lay out scholarly published
evidence to support it
4) Produce a well-organized and clearly written paper to serve
as a model for any future
scientific writing assignments
5) Become familiar with and practice using APA writing style
and editorial format
**Remember to hold onto each of the graded assignments you
turn in for this proposal. All
of them will be placed in a folder as your writing portfolio,
showing your progress from a
research interest to a fleshed out proposal.**
Proposal Content
The body of your research proposal will be between ~2,500-
3,000 words (per typical research
proposal guidelines from funding agencies like the National
Science Foundation). The title page,
Abstract, References section, figures/tables, and any appendices
are not included in this word
count. Below is the structure I recommend for your research
proposal. If you feel that your
proposed project warrants a different structure or use of
subheadings, you’re welcome to play
around with that. However, you should somehow cover all of
these topics in your proposal and
write no more than 3,000 words in the body of your proposal.
I. Abstract: (200-250 words, not counted towards word limit)

55. This introductory section
is brief – a single paragraph is enough. You should state your
underlying research question
(using 1-2 important cited sources as a framework) and then
briefly describe how those sources,
when synthesized, are relevant to answering your research
question. A brief reference to the
study’s general hypothesis with specific predictions should also
be included here, as well as a
sentence or two explaining how you will conduct your study,
and one major discussion point.
You should write this section after revising your first draft. Do
this section after revising Draft
#1 because the abstract provides practice in condensing and
pulling out the most important points
of your proposal, which you may not have been ironed out until
the second draft.
!
3
II. Background Literature: (3 pages) This consists of two parts.
First, you will review
the literature on the current state of knowledge relevant to your
study using primary scholarly
journal articles (i.e., specific studies conducted by researchers).
Second, after your literature
review, you will end this section by using scholarly sources to
provide a strong justification for

56. why a study like the one you will be proposing in the next
section should be conducted (i.e.,
identify the gap in the literature your study will fill). This
Background Literature section should
be sufficiently detailed to enable the reader to place your study
in the broader context of related
theories and scholarly literature and make it clear why your
study is necessary and will
contribute to the psychology community. Do not write about
your specific study
details/methodology or your hypothesis just yet!
III. Proposed Work: (2-3 pages) This should be a description of
the participant/subject
details, design, materials/apparatus used, data collection
procedures you will use to test your
hypothesis for your original research question, as well as your
theory-driven hypothesis and
specific predictions. Enough detail is needed to show that you
have read relevant articles’
methodology sections and have thoughtfully developed an
original, realistic, and ethical study.
In the real world, the more organized a researcher appears to be,
the more likely his or her
research grant proposal is to be funded, so feel free to include
diagrams or schematics explaining
your design if needed. The Proposed Work section will include
four subheadings: Participants
(for humans) OR Subjects (for nonhumans), Materials (for
surveys or images, not equipment)
OR Apparatus (equipment that is built or major technology like
fMRI machine), Procedure, and
Hypothesis and Predicted Results. Look to the published
literature you’re reading to get an idea
of what sort of information is relevant to include in each of

57. these sub-sections. For example,
even though this is a proposal for a study, you should still
provide your desired participant
demographics (e.g., ethnicity, gender break down, sample size,
and average age).
The Hypothesis and Predicted Results subsection should start
with a recap of the gap in the
literature you identified in the Background Literature section.
Next, use scholarly literature to
develop and explicitly state a well-supported, logical
hypothesis. Next, include what specific
quantitative data you will collect, what you will do with those
data in terms of descriptive
statistics (e.g., compare means, correlate the two variables),
what you specifically predict (e.g.,
the Photo Group will recall significantly more objects on
average than the Word Group) as well
as whether you would predict a p-value greater than or less than
.05. [Grant proposals submitted
to the National Science Foundation, for example, must include
details about statistical
procedures and tests to be used. If you have not recently taken
a statistics course, you do not
need to worry too much about statistics for this proposal. If
you have taken statistics, feel free to
include a sentence about the test you would use!] Finally,
illustrate what your specific
prediction(s) would look visually like by creating one original
figure (i.e., graph) of hypothetical
data. This figure should be referenced in the text (e.g., “See
Figure 1”), must be created in
Excel, and must be formatted in APA editorial format. You’re
welcome to include additional
figures, tables, and appendices as needed. See Appendix C of
this packet for formatting help. I

58. will provide more resources for this if you need it!
!
4
IV. Implications: (1 page) While the significance of the project
at a scientific level
should have been made clear in the Background section (e.g.,
filling a gap), this is where you
will think critically about your predicted results and the greater
significance of your study. How
will your results (if your hypothesis is supported) affect the Big
Picture of the field about which
you have been reading? That is to say, who should care about
your study and why? Who in the
real world would be affected, and how? Is there an applied
value down the road, or even
currently? These are hard questions, but every researcher has to
be able to justify why their
research is of value. This need not always require any kind of
immediate benefit, nor relate to
improving the human or nonhuman condition—but it can, so
talk about it if it does! The quest
for knowledge, applied or basic, in psychology is sufficient if
you can provide evidence (with the
help of a few relevant primary sources, possibly new ones you
haven’t used yet in your proposal)
that both the scientific and greater communities should be
interested in the research question
your proposal addresses.

59. V. Discussion: (1.5 pages) In this section, you should address
the following two
questions using primary sources to support your claims: 1) How
would obtaining negative (i.e.,
opposite of what you predict) results inform the scientific
community? That is to say, what
would be some plausible explanations for negative results? For
example, why might the control
group score higher on the spatial reasoning task you developed,
even though what you read up to
this point suggests the opposite should have occurred? 2) How
would obtaining null (i.e., no
correlation or no difference in mean scores) results inform the
scientific community? That is to
say, what would it mean if the control and experimental groups
scored the same on your task or
there was zero correlation? What could account for such
findings? “Cop-out” arguments such
as “participants lie on surveys,” “I don’t have enough
participants,” or “something was wrong
with my task” are not acceptable here, as any good researcher
would do their best to design
around superficial problems such as these. Think critically (!!),
and consult the literature to try
to explain alternative findings of negative and null results. To
support your alternative
explanations, you will need to seek out and cite additional
scholarly sources. This section is one
of the more challenging ones, so do not put off thinking about it
until last!
VI. References: You are required to include as many primary
research articles (plus 1 scholarly
book or book chapter) as necessary in order to completely

60. address the four sections above.
There is no minimum or maximum number of primary research
articles to include, but I will say
that students in the past who dove into the literature and really
practiced synthesizing and
integrating >5 sources scored substantially higher than their
peers and went on to be substantially
better prepared for PSYC201. Any article cited in the text must
be fully referenced in the
References section at the end of your proposal, and vice versa.
Citations in the text and in the
References section must be in APA editorial format. Please DO
NOT use a citation exporter to
do your citations for you. They are rarely ever accurate. There
are many resources available to
help you with formatting by hand. See Appendix C of this
packet for details.
!
5
Grading Details
Proposals must be no more than 3,000 words (i.e., aim for 8-10
pages of content). This will
be sufficient space to write a formal APA style research
proposal at the PSYC101 level. The
separate title page, Abstract, References, table(s)/figure(s)
pages, and appendices do *not* count
towards total page length or word count. Feel free to use
textbooks as resources to find primary
sources and scholarly books. However, a textbook cannot serve

61. as your scholarly book source for
this proposal, nor should textbooks appear in the text or
References section (since you’re using
them to find journal articles).
Please double-space your proposal and use 12-point Times New
Roman font, with 1-inch
margins on all sides, and adhere to APA editorial format at the
level that is provided in this
packet’s resource guides. Full credit cannot be earned for non-
compliance in formatting.
Your final proposal (100 pts.) will be graded using the rubric,
which can be found in
Appendix B. A portion of the grade (10%) will be devoted to
writing improvement. This
includes not only making appropriate revisions directed by
peer-reviewers and me, but also
making independent changes and making use of the resources
available to you as you improve
your writing.
What makes a great proposal? Along with following the section
instructions, Grading Details
and rubric, and the resources starting on p. 17, a great paper
makes novel connections among
many sources to create something new (called “synthesizing”
the literature). Think of articles as
puzzle pieces that can be put together to form a completely new
puzzle depending upon how you
use them. A great proposal also pays attention to details that
are being asked for in each section.
Read carefully to make sure you include everything. Also, a
great proposal is one that has been
written by a student who is invested in their work and excited to
learn!

62. Finally, believe it or not, a great proposal involves
collaboration. You are encouraged to
collaborate every step of the way except for serious thinking
and writing. I support and
encourage you to work together, with me, and with writing
tutors at the Center for Writing,
Learning, and Teaching (CWLT, Howarth 109) to discuss your
ideas early on and to seek help
for revision; however, the critical thinking to determine how to
use sources and all writing
must be completed independently!
Topics of Interest
Due: Friday, September 8
Most students will not have taken a psychology course before
this one, and therefore may not
know what aspects of the field are most intriguing to them.
That is okay and expected!
However, you’ll need to start thinking seriously about topics
before we get too far into the
course. To generate ideas and help you discover your interests
in psychology, you will get
started by completing the Topics of Interest assignment.
1. Read through the entire Subject Index (yes, A-Z!) at the end
of the textbook.
2. Record the 10 topics and their page numbers in the textbook
that you find most
intriguing.

63. !
6
Get specific with a sub-topic if one is available. For example,
you might have an item on your
list that looks like: Memory, priming, p. 330
If you are unfamiliar with a particular topic but it catches your
attention in the index, flip to the
page in the textbook or do a quick Wikipedia search and read a
little bit about it.
3. From this list of 10, put asterisks next to the FOUR (4) topics
about which you’d most
like to do some further reading.
If you have an interest within the field of psychology and it
does not appear in the textbook, I
invite you to add those interests to your list and consult me. As
you formulate your list, ask
yourself if the topics you’re choosing are ones that can be
studied with a testable hypothesis and
a correlation or experimental design. For example, while
synesthesia, dreams, and psychological
disorders are interesting topics, could you design a realistic
research proposal around one of
them? Maybe, but you’d have to get really creative.
4. In one paragraph, briefly reflect on what you’ve discovered
about your interests in
psychology and/or the breadth of the field.

64. !The list of 10 sub/topics with 4 asterisked and your one-
paragraph reflection on the exercise is
what you will turn in at the start of class on Friday, Sept. 8.
Everything should be typed.
Note: To complete this assignment, you need only skim Subject
Index topics. But of course, feel
free to do some further investigative work on Wikipedia,
Google Scholar, or PsycINFO if you
know how. We will do a formal researching workshop on
Wednesday, September 11. Go where
your intellectual curiosity takes you! Keep the end goal in the
front of your mind… You will
develop an original research proposal for a correlation or
experiment on a subject in psychology
that is of great interest to you. You’ll need to start by getting a
good understanding of that topic
and its underlying theories, and then consider some important
questions that come to you. Any
preliminary thinking you do now will set you up for the next
exercise, which involves looking at
the published literature in journals relevant to your interests!
!
7
Articles of Interest + Research Questions – 15 pts.
Due: Monday, September 18

65. With the Topics of Interest exercise, you discovered topics in
the field of psychology that are
most intriguing to you. Since then, we have solidified the
difference between a correlation and
an experiment, as well as what makes a research question
scientific and testable. Now, the goal
of this assignment is to put your reading and researching skills
to the test to access and become
oriented with primary literature related to your interests. To
assist with this, I will have already
provided you with relevant journal titles for you to search.
1. Skim through the Table of Contents (TOC) and read the
article titles contained in the
TWO (2) most recent issues for each of the three journal titles
that I provided.
You can access issues for journals by going to Collins Memorial
Library’s Journal Locator by
clicking on the Journals tab in the rectangular box on the main
library page: www.library.ups.edu
Type in the name of the journal I provided and follow the links
to the journal’s website. From
there, you should be able to figure out how to access the TWO
(2) most recent issues to which
the university has access, but if you have any trouble with this,
please ask me or Andrea
Kueter—our liaison librarian—for help! Andrea can be reached
at x2875 or by email at
[email protected]
2. Write APA format citations for the TWO (2) journal articles
that you find most
intriguing from each journal issue’s ToC.
Organize your list by journal and issue number so it is easy for
me to see your progress. Use the

66. APA citation guide in Appendix C of this packet to help you
with APA formatting. DO NOT
use a citation exporter. It may be tempting to use, but it will
not be 100% correct, and you won’t
learn anything about how to write APA citations.
For each citation you record, open and skim the article and
practice searching for important
points (e.g., question, alternative answers, method, logical
predictions, results, inferences). Look
carefully at any figures that are provided. Using what you
learned from your article skimming,
write a 3-sentence summary for each article under its citation.
Avoid looking at the Abstract
until after you summarize the article to reduce temptation to
plagiarize ideas from it.
3. Under each summary, write TWO (2) strong research
questions that arose as you
skimmed and considered that article’s ideas and findings.
Consider the population, species, task, findings, implications, or
anything else you found
interesting as you read, and jot down questions that arise. For
example, I once read a paper that
suggested writing about a value that is personally important
decreases prejudice expressed
toward others. I wondered, though, why writing about a
personally important value decreases
group-level prejudice. Perhaps writing about a value important
to a social group may be a better
strategy to reduce prejudice.
!

67. 8
You’ll notice my research question has some logic behind it.
The best research questions will,
but some of yours might be uninformed “I wonder what would
happen if…” questions that come
from what you read, and that’s okay, too! Get creative, and
have fun with this exercise! Keep in
mind, you will be writing a proposal for either an experiment or
a correlation study. While
“why” questions (e.g., Why are social mammals better problem
solvers than nonsocial
mammals?) are great, they cannot easily be answered with an
experiment or correlation. For this
assignment you will be assessed heavily on your ability to
develop research questions that are
testable with an experiment or correlation. To help me assess
your ability to design such studies,
beside each question, write whether it represents an Experiment
or Correlation. For example:
Question – Does providing a therapy dog for one hour twice a
week for 6 weeks reduce
behavioral outbursts in autistic children compared to a control
group? (Experiment).
4. Place an asterisk next to the FOUR (4) research questions
from this exercise by which
you are most intrigued.
! Following the instructions carefully, you should have 12 APA
article citations with brief
original summaries, 24 testable research questions that indicate
Experiment or Correlation, and 4
of the questions asterisked. This is what you will turn in at the

68. start of class on Wednesday,
September 18. Everything should be typed.
Note: Once you turn in this assignment, you can get ahead by
doing a little more reading on the
questions you asterisked. You’ll be asked to select your
favorite research question and search for
multiple relevant articles to support a strong hypothesis. This
Hypothesis + Summary Statement
(your next writing exercise) will be the foundation of your
research proposal.
!
9
Hypothesis + Summary Statement – 20 pts.
Due: Wednesday, October 4
With the Articles of Interest + Research Questions assignment,
you identified questions that
arose out of recent literature in a field of psychology relevant to
your interests. Since then, you
hopefully have been continuing to consider these questions and
are now ready to decide which
one you would most like to pursue for your research proposal.
Now, the next step towards the
development of your proposal will be to fully READ some
articles and construct an argument

69. leading to a supported hypothesis and methodology. Here are
your goals for this assignment:
1. Present the research question that you predict from your
reading as well as the scholarly
information to help you design an original experiment OR
correlation study (your
choice).
2. Develop a testable hypothesis that is supported and informed
by the literature in your
topic’s field. Return to your notes and textbook about science
and research questions.
3. Carefully select 4-5 primary research articles (the scholarly
book can wait until Draft
#1) that help you communicate to the reader the Four Ws (see
next page). You will do
more reading and expand your number of sources as you write
your drafts.
Below is an example of how you could format the assignment.
This is one of my own research
studies (CAUTION: The study I describe is a quasi-experiment;
you may NOT propose a quasi-
experiment!). You should not use the exact wording (e.g., “As I
read about the topic…”) below.
Rather, use my example to see the information to include and
notice how the hypothesis came
supported directly out of the literature that I read. Further,
notice that I walked my reader
through my argument/train of thought using sources to arrive at
my hypothesis at the end:

70. As I read about the topic of self-affirmation and prejudice, I
wondered why Fein and Spencer
(1997) tested whether a self-affirmation (writing about a
personally important value, like
creativity) would reduce prejudice, given that prejudice is a
group-level phenomenon. (! This was
one of my asterisked research questions from the Articles of
Interest exercise, if you recall.). From here, I read
articles about self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1989), social
identity theory (Tajfel & Turner,
1986), and social categorization theory (Turner et al., 1987). I
learned that while writing about
personally important values can produce positive outcomes, the
task cues categorization at the
individual level (“I am a unique person)” rather than at the
group level (“I am a part of XXX
group”) (! This was all more reading that came out of my
research question and honed my topic to affirmation-
reduction strategies to reduce prejudice). I noticed there was
little published literature about using a
group-affirmation (writing about a value important to one’s
social group) to reduce prejudice (!
Identifying a gap in the literature!), so I thought I would read
more about the conditions in which
thinking about your social group may actually decrease (as
opposed to increase) prejudice. I
learned that a group-affirmation would work best when the
groups under examination have a
clear ingroup/outgroup distinction (i.e., White vs. Black
Americans). For my study, I would like
to design an experiment that compares the effect of a self-
affirmation and group-affirmation on
prejudice. The manipulation will be the type of affirmation task.
Participants will be White
Americans, and the target group will be Black Americans (so
White participants will be given an

71. opportunity to express prejudice toward Blacks. (! Final piece
of the puzzle… a reference to design to be
used and proposed methodology!)
!
10
HYPOTHESIS: I predict that a group-affirmation will reduce
prejudice more than a self-
affirmation or control condition. Past work has suggested that a
self-affirmation can reduce
prejudice (Fein & Spencer, 1997), yet the social identity
approach (Tajfel & Turner, 1986;
Turner et al., 1987) suggests that the affirmation task (writing
about a personally important
value) forces people to categorize as an individual level.
Therefore, a group-affirmation (which
keeps people categorized at the group level) is a better test of
whether or not an affirmation
reduces prejudice. (! A hypothesis that is logically built out of
cited literature)
As you work, make sure you address the Four Ws of any good
scientific paper. Great
researchers in any field of psychology know they must provide
context in order for their readers
to understand the value of their study. As was illustrated in the
example above, the sources that a
researcher selects are CRUCIAL to formulating a coherent
argument. As your audience, I want
to be able to read your Hypothesis + Summary Statement

72. assignment and understand very
clearly:
1) What is the theory and/or background context surrounding
your proposed study?
2) What is the study doing that advances the field of
psychology? That is, explain the gap
you observed in the literature.
3) Why is the author (you) predicting what he/she is predicting?
4) What methodology will the author (you) use to answer the
question?
To address the Four Ws, carefully select all your sources so that
each contributes in some way to
answering at least one of these questions. In the case of theory
and background, more than two
sources may be more helpful.
In the above example, you’ll see the Fein and Spencer (1997)
article I cited was selected because
it provided a strong theory from which my research question
developed (W#1). The Steele
(1986), Tajfel and Turner (1986), and Turner et al. (1987)
sources provided background research
(W#1 & 2) on affirmation theory and intergroup processes. The
Turner et al. (1987, and
Sherman & Hartson, 2006) work provided more background that
helped me see the disconnect
between theories and lead to my prediction (W#3). The Fein
and Spencer (1997) article also
provided me with information about the affirmation task that I
would use for my method (W#4).
Notice how carefully the articles were selected? I did not pick
the first 5 articles I found on