Research publications/Theory of science
Research paper:
Journal of Adolescence is a multinational journal that addresses issues
regarding development between puberty and the accomplishment of adult students
within the society. Impact factor: 2,050.
I chose the descriptive study and paper “The
effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive
behaviors, and school performance” where the task was to find
correlations between violent video games exposures and aggressive behaviors.
The procedure was mainly a quantitative study in form
of a survey which was sent out during a mandatory class event to a bunch of
about six hundred students with an average age of fourteen.
A lot of different variables were introduced to easier
collect data in the survey. Participants had the opportunity to grade these
variables on different point scales depending on specific questions where for
instance “1 “was rarely and “7” often. The variables were measured out of violent video game exposure, amount of game
play, trait hostility, parental limits, arguments with teachers, grades and
finally physical fights.
Some conclusions were found in the end:
· Violent video
game exposures are correlated to aggressive behaviors like arguing with
teachers and physical fights.
· Low-hostile
students with high violent video games exposures are more likely to get
involved in physical fights than high-hostile students with low violent video
games exposures.
· Amount of game
play is negatively associated with school performance but not linked with
aggressive behaviors.
· Parents who are
in the process of video game selection and observe hours played are more
probable to have kids who get involved in fewer physical fights.
I want to discuss the reliability of the survey
because it´s rather subjective where all of the students probably have a lot of
different opinions about for example their exposure of violent games and how do
define a violent game or a hostile student. Good though that the study was not
elective which reduced the probability of self-selection prejudice.
The questions:
1.
Russel defines
sense-data as things which is directly known in sense-expressions. For instance
colors’, sounds, smells and so on. He uses the term sensation which is the
awareness of for example a smell, and the smell is in turn a sense-datum. He
believes It´s important to understand the relations of sense-data to physical
objects. Sense-data is individual perspectives and are private to each person. Physical
objects have correspondence with sense-data like a catalogue has a
correspondence with contents inside of it.
2.
A Proposition of
a thing could tell us the properties. Mostly we are aware of a specific
proposition which is described and acknowledged to be true, but the issue is
that maybe we are not familiar with the proposition itself and therefore don´t
know it because we are missing some experience of it, but we know it´s true. A
statement of fact is something familiar which has resulted in a belief, but it´s
important that the belief is true.
3.
Definite
description is a phrase of the form “the so and so” and means that there is one
specific object with a certain property. We have some descriptive knowledge
about “the so and so”. The opposite ambiguous description “so and so” doesn´t
really tell us if we are acquainted with the object which on the other hand a
definite description does.
4.
These are some
of the main points he argues about:
·
True beliefs
can´t be identified as knowledge when they are reasoned from false beliefs.
·
That knowledge
isn´t a particular notion, it´s more likely a possible opinion.
·
Coherent
opinions are more likely to be true than anyone of them would be separately.
