Theme 1

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.