Foreign Perspectives

This is a somewhat peculiar piece of work that we’ve to do. Since it’s a practical you would obviously assume from that that we have to find a few children and do some practical experiment on them. These days that wouldn’t be quite such a simple thing to organise of course as youve first of all to find some children, then get the parents permission and, of course, there’d be the sex offenders register check that would need done on you as well.

So, what the Open University have done is to conduct a whole series of interviews and record them in advance. Thus we don’t need to find children, get permission and get ourselves checked out thus most of the administration hassles are removed. I suspect that these days the time taken for the pre-experiment administration would mean that some of it would need to be done pretty much as soon as we signed up for the course if it was a real practical exercise that we were going to be doing for the assignment.

What we have to do is to take these interviews and analyse them to see if they conform to Rosenberg’s theory. That’s essentially a theory of identity and basically says that younger children will tend to consider the various aspects of their identity as being defined externally whilst older children will tend to rely on themselves to define their identity. So, for example, a young child will tend to describe themselves in terms of physical characteristics and aspects that can be seen by others, whereas an older child will tend to talk about internal feelings and values.

Next up is writing up the research report which is a full-blown report in terms of format. So there’ll be a title, abstract, introduction, methods section, results, discussion and conclusion along with references and appendices. Sounds easy but I suspect that it’ll be extremely time-consuming so I’m making a proper start on it today with the writing of the methodology section which seems to be by far the easiest bit to do and, according to their suggested plan, should see me with the first 400 words written from the 2000 target.

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