Interpersonal Communications Research
check out my whole paper here:
What leads cross-sex friends to create a "friend with benefits relationship"? What characteristics do men and women have that attract the opposite sex together? Using the Attraction Theory as a driving source, we found that men and women are similar when deciding whether or not they want to pursue a relationship with their friend of the opposite sex. Read all about it in my research paper!
Read more about the process here
There is no doubt that this research project was by far the most interesting part of my college career, specifically in my major. "Interpersonal Communication" was my focus for my BA and this class taught me so much about myself and other people than most courses I had taken at KU. I spent the first half of my semester with 20 other peers learning about all sorts of theories that connect people together. I would hurry to class as fast as possible to be sure to sit in the front of the room. The best part about my class was that everyone, not just myself, was eager to engage and discuss all these topics. Whether it was friendship formation or the process of disengaging as friends, there was so much learning to be done through our discussions.
The second semester we teamed up with a partner to figure out what theory or topic was the most interest to us. From there, we began our research process: defining our hypothesis and variables, creating a Likert-type scale, and communicating with our college community. I was extremely nervous to take on this project (mostly because research has always intimidated me) but my classmates and especially my professor made this process a breeze. We spent many hours in the library computer lab entering our data in a computing system which allowed us to figure out our Cronbach's Alpha and reliability. Happy to say our hypothesis had a reliability of .90 > meaning we were pretty spot on in Layman's terms.
I truly thought this was just a class I had to cross off the list in order to graduate but I ended up learning so much more from my research experience and discovered how interesting and passionate I am about interpersonal communication among all people.