Experiment

MySpace: The relationship between males and females when talking about their significant other and their sense of “self”.

What: I will create a MySpace page that current non-private users can upgrade to. This new page will contain many more features that will enable its user to talk more about his/her significant other. For example, it will have a section that says “All about my significant other and me”, “a picture of me and my significant other and my thoughts on it”, “What me and my significant other love to do together”. It will be up to the user whether to upgrade or not. Before they choose to upgrade the new page will be explained to them and the new features will be highlighted to make sure they are aware of them.
Who: I will run this study on 18 to 25 year olds because I think that this age group is most likely to actually have a MySpace page and to be in a relationship that is not necessarily permanent and be either in favor of their own self identity without including their loved one or in order to talk about their self identity they have to include their significant other.
When: I think I that I will make these upgrade options available to the users many times during the course of one day, to make sure that they are logged on and are actually aware of the option and in case they do not accept to upgrade but change their minds later on, I will do this for about a month to make sure that I get a good number of people to make my results more reliable.
Where: I will conduct this study from my lab and my computer I will also review the results in my lab.
Why: This experiment will allow us to measure two things; one is we will be able to see how many users actually want to upgrade to this new page once they realize that it has more sections where they can include their significant other rather than themselves only. The second thing is that those who do upgrade to this new page will have to fill in these new sections about their significant other and themselves; based on the responses they give we will be able to see if they talk about their significant other as part of their self identity and who they are or if they talk about them as just something more in their life that does not influence their idea of “self”.