Guest Sociology Writers
Throughout these past few weeks at New Hope-Solebury High School, all sociology classes have been scrambling to get their research projects finished. Looking at lower and upperclassmen self-confidence was a huge hit on what to write about. Our research project was based on if you are an upperclassmen, then you will most likely have more confidence in what you wear compared to underclassmen. We chose this topic because we have seen a majority of differences in what upper and underclassmen wear. We have noticed that multiple seniors dress more casual than lots of freshmen. Our research was a little different than what we were expecting. We expected juniors and seniors to say they felt really confident in whatever they wear to school and freshmen and sophomores would be less confident. Instead of finding what we believed, we found that multiple juniors and seniors still get anxiety or feel worried about what they wear at school.
During the research, we found that some upperclassmen said stuff like “I’m mostly afraid that people will judge what I wear by calling me a slut” or “I feel uncomfortable.” Not a lot of upperclassmen said that but a few did say that they feel uncomfortable in what they wear or how much anxiety they get from wearing different things. Multiple people, even underclassmen, said they really don’t care in what they wear. We just didn’t think upperclassmen worried about what they wore. We kind of just thought since they are the older kids, that they don’t care what the underclassmen think. We were wrong and we just weren’t expecting that. The approximate average for the confidence in upperclassmen is eight. We thought that number would be around ten, not just eight. Eight is still a high average, but we just were expecting higher. We just found that to be very interesting.
During this project, we had to write a six page paper, an article, and multiple surveys. This project included lots of hard work, time management, and teamwork. It was a fun project, which helped us find out how upper and underclassmen think. It was also cool how we could put what we learned in class into the real world. We were able to use the social science research method; define the problem, review the literature, hypothesis, select a research design, do the research, interpret the results, and report your findings. It was just really interesting to see how something we learned in class could be used in real life. It was fun to see people’s reactions in writing about how they feel about what they wear to school. Some of the results were upsetting because they said they got anxiety or something like that, but it was still really intriguing to see the results. We just thought this project was lots of fun and really cool.
After completing this project, there was definitely a sigh of relief because this project was a lot of work but I also think we learned a lot from this experience. We thought we need to learn to be less judgmental because some students in our school feel pressured to dress and look nice. No one should feel pressured to look a certain way at school, so after completing this we decided that we don’t want to judge people anymore based on what they wear. This experience was really great and we’re hoping we’ll be able to do something this incredible again.
