Openness To Experience Essay

Openness to experience is one of the ‘Big Five’ factors and is used to study and measure individual differences in personality. A person with a high level of openness to experience will often enjoy venturing beyond his or her comfort zone. They seek out new, unconventional and unfamiliar experiences, travelling to new destinations, embracing different cultures and practices. This investigation will be conducted to analyse the effect of musical situation on openness to experience. It is hypothesised that if a participant listens to a preferred genre than their openness to experience percentile will increase. People share different perceptions therefore this data will be subjective because subjective data is based on self-reports provided by

Participants completed the ‘Big 5’ test online while listening to both preferred and non-preferred musical genres. This test gave a percentile score for openness to experience. Higher score equates to higher levels of Openness to Experience. It is hypothesised that if a participant listens to a preferred genre than their openness to experience percentile will increase. Due to the experimental guidelines, only the eight participants with the highest openness to experience levels were considered in the data obtained therefore, some modification were made. In this investigation there were 24 participants; 13 females and 11 males all aged between 16-18 years old from Stage 2 Psychology at Endeavour College indicating that the socio-economic status of the participants would be relatively similar. No all participants demonstrated a lower level of openness to experience during the non-preferred genre. ID 135 is the outlier of the investigation as participants, this participants scored a percentile of 90 whilst listening to preferred music however, the most frequent number scored by the other 7 participants range from 30 to 50. ID 135 can also be seen as an outlier as they scored a percentile of 60 whilst listening to non-preferred music while the other 7 participants scored between 20-40. Whilst participants consistently received high percentile scores, participants

ID 135 can also be seen as an outlier as they scored a percentile of 60 whilst listening to non-preferred music while the other 7 participants scored between 20-40. Whilst participants consistently received high percentile scores, participants 496 scored the lowest percentile in each environment (20) which may have skewed the mean. A sample size is a small group that represents the population, twenty four participants took part in this investigation. This is not a large enough sample size to determine conclusive results because it is too small to make inferences about the population. Another factor concerning the sample of this experiment is that the investigation was tested by students aged from 16-18 which is not a large enough variety. To ensure a representative sample the experimenter would need to consider how all of the participants are of the same socioeconomic status and that, the chosen songs representing each music genre may have affected whether or not they liked the