Clustering of worry appraisals among college students

ABSTRACT

The present study investigated the potential clustering of worry appraisals within college social networks. Participants living in campus residence buildings responded to online surveys across the course of several months. Worry appraisals were measured 10 weeks into the fall semester and again approximately 6 months later. Analysis of sociometric data suggests that the majority of participants’ social interactions occurred within their respective residence building floors, indicating that proximity strongly influenced the development of social network ties and sources of social influence. Further, significant clustering of worry appraisals occurred across time, and more importantly, within residence building floors. The present findings compliment previous work suggesting that several physical and psychological states appear to spread and cluster within social networks. Implications for the study of emotional appraisals and future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Appraisals
• social networks
• social norms
• worry

Notes

1. These chance of conversing rates were based on the odds that a student would nominate a person within each residential unit (e.g. building or floor) as its proportion to the overall size of the student body living on campus. Floormates make up roughly 1% of the 4,000 students living on campus. Thus, 1% was used as a planned contrast point, based on their base rate proportion of all students on campus. Similar base rate points were computed for residential building and used as a point of planned contrast.

2. Nested-ANOVAs may commonly be used when researchers investigate meaningful levels of a fixed IV (e.g., mixed-gender residence buildings may worry more than male-only halls) while controlling for another variable of no particular interest but nevertheless has levels that are mutually confounded with the IV (e.g., each building contains unique floors, which may worry to varying degrees). For our purposes however, we are interested in the random effects of local social influence processes occurring within floors, which are confounded with the fixed levels of residence buildings. Our predictions regarding emerging floor differences in worry appraisals pertain to whether or not a floor, as a set of interacting individuals, meaningfully predicts worry appraisals (a random effect), rather than predicting discrete differences between floors (e.g., floor X will worry more than floor Y). For this reason, a Nested-ANOVA that treats “floor” as a random effect while controlling for superordinate differences in residence buildings, is an appropriate test of our hypothesis (Jackson & Brashers, 1994). Furthermore, because mean differences between floors are arbitrary and uninformative with respect to our hypothesis, we wanted to compute an effect size estimate of the extent to which worry appraisals cluster within floors. Therefore, we computed an ² for the SWQ DV by dividing the sum of squares of the floor-within-building effect by the total sum of squares (Howell, 2002). This creates an index of the amount of variation in worry appraisals that is attributable to within floor social influence processes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas G. Schwab

Nicholas G. Schwab is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa. His research focuses on the emergence of social norms and the psychological foundations of culture. Jerry C. Cullum is currently an Education Research Consultant at the Office of Special Education for the Michigan Department of Education. Helen C. Harton is Professor of Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa. Her research is primarily in the area of attitude change and social influence, broadly defined.

Jerry C. Cullum

Nicholas G. Schwab is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa. His research focuses on the emergence of social norms and the psychological foundations of culture. Jerry C. Cullum is currently an Education Research Consultant at the Office of Special Education for the Michigan Department of Education. Helen C. Harton is Professor of Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa. Her research is primarily in the area of attitude change and social influence, broadly defined.

Helen C. Harton

Nicholas G. Schwab is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa. His research focuses on the emergence of social norms and the psychological foundations of culture. Jerry C. Cullum is currently an Education Research Consultant at the Office of Special Education for the Michigan Department of Education. Helen C. Harton is Professor of Psychology at the University of Northern Iowa. Her research is primarily in the area of attitude change and social influence, broadly defined.