Holding Open The Door

For this assignment on collecting and analyzing naturalistic data I collected data on what percent of students held open the door entering and exiting Beatty hall. There are four categories that student can fall into during this study students that: don’t hold open the door, wait and hold open the door, automatically hold open the door, and don’t have anyone to hold the door open for. The people that automatically hold open the door are passing the door to someone immediately behind them. I hypothesize that 20% of students to enter Beatty will wait and hold the door for the next person and that an additional 30% will automatically being holding the door for the next person due to proximity. The remaining 50% will be 30% of students that don’t hold the door and 20% where there is nobody around to hold the door for. I estimated these hypothesized amounts based my experience of going in and out of Beatty over the last 4 years. Figure 1 is a pie chart providing a visual of the hypothesized percent of people holding the

door. This research design experiment would be classified as descriptive research because it analyzes the behavior of individuals. This type of descriptive research is also known as naturalistic observation which is “research based on the observation of everyday event.” (stangor 2.2)
I spent 20 minutes sitting inside Beatty analyzing the doors to see who would hold open the door and who would let the door drop entering and exiting the building.

It is important to note I am considering a person who is within 6 steps of the door clearly going to enter the building as the distance of an opportunity to hold open the door. During this 20 minutes 149 people entered or exited the building. Of those 149 people 31 people did not have anyone to hold open the door for leaving 118 people that had the ability to hold the door for the next person. Of the 118 people 94 people held open the door while 24 people let the door close on the next person. Within those 94 people that held open the door 67 people held the door for someone who was a step behind them which still counts as holding the door but not as substantial as the remaining 27 people who decided to wait and hold the door. A pie chart breaking down the statistics can be seen in figure

2.
Comparing the hypothesized and experimental percentage of door holding in figure 1 and figure 2 it can be seen the data varied what from what was guessed to occur. The percent of people who were flowing through the door was greater then estimated causing the automatic door holding amount to be higher in experimental. The amount of people that didn’t have anyone to hold the door for and that did not hold open the door varied only slightly from the hypothesized amount. The amount of people who did not hold the door was significantly less then the percent estimated prior to the experiment taking place.