Our group has two sets of hypotheses, one alternative hypothesis and one null hypothesis. The first hypothesis is that one’s selfish attitude is positively associated with lesser civic engagement, the second one is that Class T01 has the same civic engagement as Class T02.

 

 

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As our first hypothesis has two different factors; civic engagement and selfish attitudes and we want to understand the relationship between them. Hence, either a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient or a Spearman’s rank order correlation test will be carried out depending on whether assumptions are violated or not. A Spearman's rank-order correlation was run to determine whether selfish attitude is associated with civic engagement. No significant relationship was found between the variables,  rs (40) = -.31, p>.05. One’s selfish attitude was not positively associated to lesser civic engagement as they are not related to one another. Results showed did not match our original hypothesis of civic engagement and selfish attitudes having a relationship.

 

However, from personal experiences, I do still feel that with higher levels of selfish attitude, one will score lesser on civic engagement as well. This is because if you do not feel inclined to volunteer, you will not participate in such activities hence a lower participation score for civic engagement. However, it could be due to similar demographic amongst the psychology students, thus there was no significant relationship between selfish attitudes and civic engagement as we were all required to attend volunteering sessions. Additionally, we could open up the options of having to go for such social service implementations and not making it compulsory. This way, we can see whether or not there is indeed a difference in selfish attitudes and levels of civic engagement, as the social service implementations will not be compulsory, having an imbalance amount of civic engagement across the population.

 

 

 

 

 

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For the second hypothesis, it has only one factor which is civic engagement, comparing between two groups. Depending on whether assumptions are violated or not, a T-independent test or a Mann Whitney U test will be used to find the results. An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the the levels of civic engagement between Class T01 and Class T02. There was no significant difference in levels of civic engagement between Class T01 (M=, SD= ) and Class T02 (M=, SD =), t(df)=, p>.05. This can then be explained that the difference between both classes are so small, it could be ignored, taking it that both classes have the same levels of civic engagement, matching our hypothesis. I do agree with this because both classes of psychology students are required to participate in the same social service implementation, hence we would have similar scores with one another. Similar to the first hypothesis, we could make the volunteering opportunities optional instead of making them compulsory. So, we can see if there would be a difference in civic engagement across the classes.

 

Future research can look towards the other factors that would contribute to one’s level of civic engagement instead of just focusing on selfish attitudes alone. Additionally, levels of civic engagement can not only be looked across two small classes within a diploma, it can be compared across the different schools in Ngee Ann Polytechnic; School of Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Film and Media Studies.