Master's Degree Experience and Thesis Investigating Psychological Reactance and Traffic Safety Messaging
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Graduate Thesis: Struggles to Success
I successfully defended and completed my thesis in May 2020. I am working with my advisor on formally publishing the study, which will be an achievement I am very proud of. My experience as a graduate student was not at all what I expected. The courses were very engaging and I was able to pursue greater knowledge in subjects pertaining to user centered design and human factors. The thesis process was much more demanding of me and presented many challenges that I had to overcome, but I was able to do it. Through my graduate experience, I reaffirmed that Human Factors is the field I have an immense interest in, especially regarding healthcare and safety. One of the most important takeaways from these courses is that the human element is often overlooked, and sometimes even ignored, which only hurts everyone involved in a system, operation, or company.
While the courses went very well for me, the individual responsibility and challenges surrounding a thesis was a stressful and sometimes agonizing process for me personally. I had so many ideas about what I could look into, and I wanted to do ALL of them with one thesis. This led me to confusion about what I was trying to investigate, what factors were involved, and what the overall goal was. Months of data analysis where I tested numerous hypotheses and analysis methods had drained me and I forgot what the original goal was. This partly explains why it took me so long to finish. Then comes the mental health challenges over the past few years that I have worked extremely hard to understand, accept, and learn how to move forward living with. In March of 2020, I hit my bottom. I felt empty, discouraged, lost, and not sure what I was going to do with my life. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and I didn't want to finish my thesis. I didn't want to do anything. Thankfully, there were many people who helped me in a time I needed it most, and I don't know where I would be without them.
With help, hope, and determination, I was able to turn myself around and move forward. I opened up about my struggles with my professors, and was grateful for their understanding and willingness to help out. One meeting with a committee member really stands out as he realized that I was trying to take the data I had gathered and do too much with it. He told me, "you can't try to go out and change the world with your thesis, but instead try to focus on a few critical things to address." This really helped relieve me of the pressure I had put on myself to try to make a difference for people as I always just want to help others. I narrowed my focus on what data I had, and clarified with my advisor regarding what the most important things to address were. From this point forward, I was able to make progress and at a remarkable rate. I would say I did significantly more, higher quality work on my thesis from February/March through May than I did the previous year prior to that.
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And now here I am. With a completed thesis that will hopefully be published within the next year or so, a graduate degree, and a more hopeful outlook on my future. I confidently can say that working in a field I am passionate about will allow me to excel beyond my expectations, where I can strive to truly bring change that helps improve the lives of others. I don't yet know where or when I will find this opportunity but when I do, I will follow it knowing I am ready and that it will enable me to live a fulfilling life where I am happy.
Thesis Abstract
Psychological reactance is a motivation to regain a freedom after it has been lost or threatened, which has led people to largely resist the social influence of others (Steindl et al., 2015). Steindl et al. (2015, pg. 205) also define psychological reactance as “an unpleasant motivational arousal that emerges when people experience a threat to or loss of their free behaviors.” Seat belt use and distracted driving are two of the highest-fatality behaviors and they pose the greatest threat to other drivers’ health and safety on U.S. roadways (NHTSA, 2018a). The purpose of this research is to investigate whether psychological reactance may be a significant factor in influencing people’s reactions and their choices to continually engage in risky behaviors. Moreover, this research looks at whether select individuals are more prone to experiencing reactance and how it may influence their willingness to follow driver safety messaging. Specifically, this research will investigate whether varying message threat and message reflection influence the amount of reactance experienced. Three main components of psychological reactance are of concern in the study: Reactance Attitude, Emotional Reactance, and Threat to Freedom. Each of these behaviors is measured for varying message conditions for two different message sets: one for Seat Belt Use and another for Distracted Driving.
For the Emotional Reactance and Threat to Freedom reactance measures, there is a significant correlation between the measures and reactance proneness. It was found that as proneness increases, the resulting psychological reactance increases as well. For the Distracted Driving messages, there was a significant effect of Message Threat for the Emotional Reactance and Threat to Freedom conditions such that low threat messages elicited less psychological reactance than high threat messages. From this study, we recommend the following aspects for designing traffic safety messages: 1) Messages should use non-controlling language (consider, can, could, may, try) over controlling language (should, ought, must, need), 2) Messages should aim to be suggesting (try to do this), rather than commanding (you MUST do this!). Additionally, high threat messages may tend to elicit stronger reactance independent of reactance proneness, supporting the proposal of avoiding high threat messages for traffic safety.