The goal of this research was to study whether the decisions made my freshmen students were largely influenced by external factors and the decisions of others. The rate of conformity in adolescents and young adults is known to be high, especially in specific situations. However, the rate at which these young adults report the extent of their conformity may not always be completely truthful. This study evaluates measures of peer pressure and peer conformity and the degree to which subjects self report the extent to which they do or do not conform to the “norms” around them. It is expected that there will be a correlation between the rate at which subjects care about popularity and succumb to peer pressure with the rate at which they expect themselves to mold to the actions and roles of those around them, thus, conforming. I surveyed 21 freshman students (11 male, 10 female) in a 38-item questionnaire. Subjects would respond to whether …show more content…
There was no significance between the three dependent variables tested. The lack of significance in a 2-tailed correlation test between each of the variables were as follows: Conformity and Peer Pressure (.376), Conformity and Popularity (.731), and Popularity and Peer Pressure (.173). However, there was proved to be a high response to the level of conformity among freshman students both male and female. According to the test of descriptive statistics, the bar graph supports that subjects responded to questions in the same manner regardless of gender. This supports the hypothesis in that gender is not a deciding factor in the rate at which any person will conform, it is simply being influenced by an outside source by peers or those in close proximity. As seen in Figure 1, both males and females had high response levels to conformity, both of them being nearly