Introduction

The coronavirus has affected may people in the world throughout the year. Many people have formed their own opinions about coronavirus and the ways it has affected them, It is important to understand the different views from everyone and if age might have an effect on their results. Coronavirus was started late last year in 2019 (Maguire, 2020) and became an international pandemic in late January, 6 months later and it is still a big issue. The way people act towards a subject is an attitude and it is important to understand people’s attitudes because it makes things we do better planned. An attitude is a way you feel about something or someone. (Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, n.d) Research on how coronavirus started has been carried out by many countries and there are a few possibilities, such as, it originating in bats or another animal, researches aren’t sure about what animal it did come from, we do know the first cases were in a seafood and live animal market in Wuhan, China. (Maguire, 2020) Previous studies have concluded that views on coronavirus change based on where the participants live. People living in the Philippines said that they were familiar with coronavirus compared to people living in France mostly said that they were not familiar with coronavirus. (Smith, 2020)

This study aims to figure out the different views of teens and adults on coronavirus.

The independent variable is the age of each participant and whether they are in the age group of below 18 or above 19.

The dependant variable is using a Likert Scale of 12 questions to assess their views.

Participants

The sampling technique that was used was convenience sampling, which means that our results will not be representative of the population which could give different results than if another sampling method were used. Our participants were family and friends of year 11 psychology students from Sunbury Downs College. In the experiment participants that were aged between 11 and 18 and participants that were aged above 19+ were asked to fill out a survey.

Materials

The materials used for the experiment were the survey which was a Likert scale with 12 questions about people’s opinions on coronavirus, a computer was also used to hand out the survey on and participants filled out the survey using their computers.

Procedure

1. Name the experimental design.
2. Consider all ethical guidelines and principles.
3. Find potential extraneous and confounding variables, and what their potential affect on the experiment could be.
4. Construct the survey using a Likert scale.
5. Write down instructions on how the survey will be given to participants.
6. Decide what type of sampling will be used.
7. Get your participants using the sampling method from above.
8. Give the survey to each participant.
9. Collect all the results from each participant.
10. Calculate averages for each question.
11. Compare the results from the different age groups.

Ethical Considerations

The participants were not informed of where their survey responses were going, this means that the participants did not know what was happening with the data. Personal data may have been entered into the survey but was kept at a minimum as participants were only needed to give their ages, not their names.

Results

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The results show that Adults had a total of 26.7 out of 45, while Teens had a total of 26. Participants on average chose a 2.86 as their response on a scale of 1-5 for each question. The average response per answer was 2.7 for people aged 11-18 and for people aged above 19 their average response was 2.9. Question 2 was the highest recording average answers and had both ages agreeing. The most negative response was question 4 with 2.25. The lowest response for the age group 11-18 was 2.3, while the lowest response for 19+ was 2.2. The highest response for people aged 11-18 was 3.7, and the highest response for people aged 19+ was also 3.7.

Discussion

The results show that age does not have a significant impact on the way that people view coronavirus, this disproves the hypothesis, as the hypothesis said that age would have an impact. The results cannot be generalised because the sampling method that has been used was convenience which includes many flaws and extraneous variables. A method such as random sampling would have been a better method to select participants more representative of the population. As the age group of 11-18 year olds was a total of 26 and peopled aged above 19 had a total of 26.7 the results show that adults and teens have the same thoughts on coronavirus as each other. The investigation could be important for communities in the future to see how councils or governments should plan about how to ease coronavirus restrictions or possibly any other threats that require people to stay inside their homes for extended periods.

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