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Not Lonely At The Top': Article Analysis

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“Not Lonely at the Top,” an article written for the New York Times by Adam Waytz, Eileen Chou, Joe Magee and Adam Galinsky investigates the correlation between feelings of power and feelings of loneliness. Researchers seeked to determine whether people who indicate that they feel they have more power in their lives experience more or less episodes of loneliness. According to the article, the researchers conducted a series of low constraint experiments to test the relationship, most of which were questionnaires in which participants were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with certain statements that dealt with power and loneliness (Waytz, Chou, Magee, Galinsky, 2015). The participants were gathered online and from colleges in order …show more content…

A longitudinal study was conducted by Eric Dearing, in which parents of almost one thousand children in daycare were interviewed about the children’s behaviors up until the children were about four years old. This study focused just on children situated in Norway and used their age as a “natural randomizer” because not all of the children were exactly the same age upon enrollment (“Association,” 2015). Reports made by the daycare teachers were also used to document the levels of aggression over time (“Association,” 2015). Since this study was also conducted through the means of interviewing, not much constraint was involved so there was room for confounding variables to interfere with the results of the data, such as bias of parents or even the daycare teachers. Being provided with examples of what kind of questions the parents and teachers were asked would be helpful in determining if there was also experimental bias, where the questions were worded in attempt to get certain answers. After the four year period was completed, based off of their data, the researchers were able to determine that children whom entered daycare shortly after infancy were not more likely to exhibit more aggression than a child who was not enrolled into daycare at such an early time (“Association,” 2015). According to the results, the children exhibited a lesser amount of aggressive behaviors at the four year mark than they did at the two year mark of being in daycare (“Association” 2015). Since the sample size was relatively large, this new theory has potential to be applied outside of Norway, but the form of “non-parental care” must be consistent as well as “high quality,” just as it was in the study in order to yield similar results in other countries (“Association,” 2015).

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