Study Title The effect that Facebook has on Self-esteem among 3rd year psychology students: upward and downward social comparison Brief review of literature “Self-esteem is related to numerous emotional states. It has been linked to anxiety and depression in the clinical literature (Mineka, Watson & Clark, 1998), to pride and shame in the developmental literature (Tangney & Fischer, 1995), to happiness and contentment in personality psychology, and to anger and hostility in social psychology (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998).” According to Coopersmith (1967) “Self-esteem refers to a person’s positive or negative evaluation of the self, the extent to which an individual views the self as worthwhile and competent.” It serves various social and existential …show more content…
(2) Is there a difference or a change in self-esteem levels with upward or downward social comparison? (3) How does social comparison affect the way that someone feels about themselves at that specific time? Epistemological orientation & Explanation The epistemology orientation is Positivist Social Science. It deals with quantitative data. According to Neuman (2014), “A positivist approach implies that a researcher begins with a cause-effect relationship that he/she logically derives from a possible causal law in general theory and logically links the abstract ideas to precise measurement of the social world.” This type of orientation tests hypotheses by carefully analysing numbers from the measures. With this said, I thought this epistemological orientation is appropriate for my proposal because I want to find a relationship between variables and how one impacts or influences the …show more content…
I have chosen not to use the classical experimental design because it needs to have two groups. My study will only use one group in which everyone will receive the treatment, so there is no control group. The reason for this is because in order for me to test whether or not social comparison impacts on an individual’s self-esteem, I have to make sure that everyone gets the same type of information and from then I can make comparisons on their responses. With that said, I will use the one-group post-test only design. This design has one group, a treatment and a post-test (Neuman,