Essay On Texting And Driving

My study topic is talking on a cell phone decreases driving ability. My theory is based on states such as Alabama, Montana, and Missouri who have no laws against texting and driving. (1) My hypothesis is the more time spent on the phone in a car, the more likely a person is to get into a wreck. To study this I will use the observational research method because I need to study a person's natural behavior while driving. If the participants know that they are being watched while they are driving, their phone use will decrease because of the Hawthorne Effect and this will cause the results of the experiment to not be precise. For my experiment I will find ten men and ten women, or twenty participants in total. To recruit them I will put up a fake

They are to treat the car as there own and use it for whatever or wherever they need to go. I will be using direct observation to study each person's cell phone habits. What the participants will not know is that there will be hidden cameras in each car to monitor their cell phone usage compared to the hours driving the car. If anyone is to get into a car accident then that will also be recorded and analysed with the rest of the data. After the end of the three months the cars will be taken in and examined for any problems or injuries sustained over the three months. The last part of this experiment will be the participants filling out a survey of how they felt about the car. My ethical concerns lie in the fact that this experiment does depend on the drivers getting into a wreck or damaging the car while texting and this may also hurt the driver themselves. I also worry that that if a participant is a particularly bad driver and creates a dangerous wreck, then they injure a third party. My last worry is that participants will be discouraged by unknowingly being filmed in their car. Many personal things happen in a car and we do not want to overstep their