Gender Maturity Among Teens

Background:         

 After developing our proposal, we approached the Internet to research relevant studies conducted on maturity levels.  We were interested to see if previous surveys had been issued to compare the maturity levels of two populations.  While browsing on www.google.com, we typed “maturity differences in gender + teenagers” into the search engine.  Based on the 183,000 results of the search, we concluded we were not the only people interested in this study.  Unfortunately, the majority of these results dealt solely with the issue of teen sex.  So, we removed the “+ teenagers” from our engine to get a wider variety of topics.  We are interested in mental maturity, not physical maturity between genders.  Yet, the results spawned from the next search did little to aid our specific study of interest.  All the results were slightly irrelevant to our study, but supported the fact that maturity levels do differ in gender.  For example, one of our first results related psychosocial maturity and assertiveness in college males and females.

Continuing to browse through Google results, we discovered another article that discussed the maturity of teens compared to their driving.  This article was posted on http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52687-2005Jan31?language=printer.  It mentioned how teenagers, having not experienced and fully developed as adults, have a higher risk of getting into car accidents; even minor ones, especially when their friends are around to distract them.  This immaturity, present in adolescents, makes them feel pressured to perform perfectly to their friends or risk feeling inferior.  This commentary was not quite relevant to our study, but it was interesting to see how maturity level relates to a driver’s performance.  Another study on http://www.SpringerLink.com/content/h4237803555410w0/, discussed a study that was conducted to find ‘the relationship between psychosocial maturity and assertiveness in males and females’.  This relationship was proven slightly stronger for males than females, but that data did not completely complement our study of interest.  Plus, this website required a fee to access the entire PDF of the study.   

Next, we decided to rephrase our search to see if our results would improve.  We changed the type in the Google search engine to “maturity differences in genders”.  Again, none of the results had anything to do with our study; most of these results discussed the “physical” maturity of teens, which is not the variable of interest.  So, we chose to use a different search resource to attain better results.  Our next search engine was www.ask.com.  Unfortunately, the same websites appeared at this search engine.  We came to the conclusion that no one has conducted this study before.  We used other engines to make sure this conclusion was correct, such as Yahoo!.  To realize no one has conducted this study before was quite displeasing.  We really wanted to have studies we use as reference tools for our project. 

We decided to stop researching similar studies and start conducting our study.  We searched a few websites that contained quizzes and tested maturity levels by asking simple questions in a survey format.  We, again, used www.google.com and found several websites with different quizzes.  We actually took those quizzes many times to see how accurate the results were to our predicted results.  For example, we took one of the quizzes as being very immature, and fortunately, the results matched.  Some websites even gave advice on how to approach changing “bad” characteristics that result in immaturity.  As our searches show, no actual study was conducted that relates to our topic.  Many articles throughout the Internet discuss maturity in teenagers, but none of them achieve to differentiate between the genders when discussing the issue.  Hopefully, with random sampling and proper significance testing, we will reach a valid conclusion that can be compared to others that might arise in the future.