Blog 8: Updated Research Plan

Statement of purpose:
In conducting this research, I hope to prove or disprove music's influence/affect on creative writings (i.e. poems, short stories).

Detailed statement of your research question:
New gadgets such as iPods, iPhones, and iPads have enabled humans to listen to music while doing any activity.  Knowing that, I will bring up the following questions:  1) Can listening to music influence/affect what students write in their creative pieces? 2) If yes, how does the writing reflect the influence of music? (what the student is writing? tone? verb usage?) 3) If no, how is listening to music affecting his or her writing? 4) Does the genre of music affect how a creative piece is written?

List of the information you need to gather:
-I will interview a few students in the English major and ask them if they write while listening to music.   The interview will expand upon what the student listens to and whether or not music influences their writings.
-I will conduct a survey on whether students listen to music while they are writing and what genre of music they listen to when they write.  The purpose of this survey is to get quantitative information on the subject.
-I will also conduct an autobiographical analysis on my own creative pieces.

Primary list of resources:
-http://www.jstor.org/stable/40170700  This article is titled, "The Effect of Four Types of Music on Spontaneous Writings of High School Students."  This article pertains to my own research question; however, the article is quite old (1976).
-http://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/handle/1951/44971 "The effects of background music on student performance."  This article is similar to the one previous listed and was published in 2009.
-I will also research the Mozart effect.  This term seems to pop up frequently when researching this specific question.
-http://futurescholars.rutgers.edu/FutureScholars/Images/Soundtracking%20Our%20Selves.pdf  This article is very exciting.  The researcher seems skeptical of music's influence on creative writing; however, at the end of the research, the researcher realizes that music does have an influence on her student's writings.

Plan for gathering the information:
-I will interview three English majors at the Starbucks at Kean University.  The interviews will have open ended questions so that I can get qualitative information on my research project.
-I will conduct a survey of English majors at Kean University for quantitative purposes.  I will hand out surveys to students within my writing classes.  My goal is to get at least 20 surveys.
-I will perform my own autobiographical analysis.  In doing so, I can get a first hand account of music's affect on writing.