The Effects of Gender on Attitudes Towards Technology Advancement

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The Effects of Gender on Attitudes towards Technology Advancement Harmanjeet Singh Melbourne High School Abstract This study investigates whether gender has an effect on students’ attitudes towards the advancement of technology in today’s society. Data were collected from twelve year 11 VCE Unit 1 &2 Psychology students, six males and six females (from Melbourne High School and Mac Robertson’s Girls High School respectively), to examine their views on attitudes toward technological advancement by the means of a Likert Scale Questionnaire. The participants responded to certain statements based on a -2 to +2 numbering from strongly disagree to strongly agree, respectively. The major finding was that the mean score in females was +9, whilst the male’s mean score was higher at +16.5. This indicated that the males had a slightly more positive attitude towards technological advancement than the females. Once the T-Test was conducted, the results were not statistically significant and therefore a comprehensive set of data was not produced. Introduction In Psychology, an attitude is a learned predisposition to behave in a consistently favourable or unfavourable way with respect to a given object. An attitude is not easily observable, and must be inferred through what people say or what they do. Usually, but not always, the attitude that a person holds is consistent. This means that their attitude involves the portrayal of that same view through the each of the Affective, Behavioural and Cognitive components of the Tri-component attitude model. Affect discusses the emotional basis on what they think about an issue. The Cognitive component refers to what a person thinks simply observing/hearing about an idea or object. The Behavioural aspect is what a person will do in regards to the views (Grivas & Carter, 2014). The presence of
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