Assignment Question
Part 1: is Reference a current social conflict in the news and confirm your interviewees would be familiar with it. This is absolutely your choice of conflict (eg.: guns, abortion, political division, book banning, funding the Ukraine war, voting, LGBTQ+, among many others). Then, read a summary of or tell them about the “potential explanations” we’ve covered in the first three modules. Create two interview questions seeking to determine if they might or might not attribute the conflict to these genetic and evolutionary factors.
Instructions:
1. Prepare a paragraph summary of the “potential explanations” from the first three modules, pertinent to your interview questions, for your interviewees’ basic understanding of the topics. (Such as genetics for aggression and violence, brain hemispheric differences, our evolutionary inheritance from Chimpanzees and Bonobos’ dominance hierarchy.) You can let the interviewee read it or read it to them.
2. Create two interview questions regarding the “potential explanations” applied to a social conflict that will elicit at least a paragraph response. (Ask “why”, “please explain”, etc., if needed to keep them talking). Here are the kinds of issues you could base your interview questions on: Can biological or genetics explain the conflict behavior? Does the conflict reflect left-right brain differences in seeing the world? Does the social grouping of the “sides” of a conflict reflect a dominance hierarchy? Any commonalities with Chimpanzee or Bonobo social behavior or other characteristics? Is aggression or violence present? What form of aggression or violence (verbal, physical, emotional) in the conflict and how might it be analyzed or explained? What other analytical questions might you ask?
3. Administer both interview questions to five different people. 4. Submit all five transcripts (they can be in the form of notes) and include the person’s approximate age, gender, and race/ethnicity; other demographics needed?
5. Include a one-page essay of your reactions to the results of the interviews.
Part 2: Based on or adapted from Delgado’s, “Discussing race and racism in the workplace: navigating conversational roadblocks on racism,” pages 5-8, create a 10-item questionnaire and administer to 10 people. This can be done in-person or using an online survey, such as “Survey Monkey” https://www.surveymonkey.com/. Delgado, R. (n.d.). Guide for navigating difficult conversations on race. University of Tennessee Chattanoga. Office of Equity and Inclusion.
Instructions: 1. Prepare a 10-item questionnaire 2. Provide response answers. Questionnaires do not have write-in responses. Response selections include “yes-no-maybe”; “on a scale of 1-5” (indicate what 1 and 5 represent!); “rank in order of importance”; “multiple choice”, and others. 3. Administer the questionnaire to 10 people. Take into consideration the questions you are addressing and who you need to answer your questions. Select a demographic that will give you meaningful responses. Consider asking these demographic questions: gender, age, race, class, religious status, political ideology, etc. 4. Demographic questions are in addition to the required 10 questions. Present the results in a chart with totals and percentages, or as a statistical graph. (After all questionnaires are completed by 10 people, count the number of each response for each of the questions.) Adding a chart to a Word document. 5. Write a one-page essay discussing the results. Did anything surprise you or were the results expected? Did the results correlate with the demographics of the people answering the questions? Did you learn anything from the results of the questionnaire?
