Peer Evaluation #2

Personally, I would like to commend everyone who completed the freshman seminar research project. I'm sure there are other things we would all like to do instead of a research project but hey, welcome to college. A constant theme I kept seeing during the freshman seminar presentations was "How does rap music effect the behavior of young children". The most common conclusion that all of the presentations seemed to address rap was the cause of youth disobedience and academic failure. Although the conclusion seemed to be unanimous amongst all of the presentations, the conclusion is actually WRONG. No group adequately explained the results of their findings correctly in accordance to psychological theory. CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION. To state that hip hop is the cause of youth disobedience is silly and inaccurate. Just because a child who listens to Lil' Wayne does bad on a spelling exam doesn't mean Lil' Wayne is the root of everything negative within the child's demeanor. None of the group presentations stated the proper limitations to their findings. To properly measure the extent to which the music influences a young person's behavior the researcher must first isolate their variables. There are many factors that limit such research. For example, IQ, adequate educational supplies, appropriate scoring rubrics etc. all effect the results in this specific research question. A more appropriate research method would have been to take a large class of the same grade and divide them into even groups allowing them to listen to different genres of music while taking a simple quiz. The results from this experiment will adequately show how music affects the school performance of youth because most variables will be controlled.