Children and Their Best Friends
Mike Shihadeh
Wayne State University

Method
Participants
The subjects of the experiment consisted of a total of forty-one children, twenty-one females and twenty males. Their ages ranged from 3-15 divided into three separate groups. The three groups consisted of a 3-5 age group, a group with ages 8-10, and lastly a group of ages 13-15. The group with the 3-5 year olds consisted of nine males and three females for a total of twelve total subjects, the group of 8-10 year olds similarly held twelve subjects eight of which were male and four being female, the last group would be the group of 13-15 year olds a total of seventeen subjects were in this group three being male and fourteen being female. The subjects were selected at the choice of the experimenters, from any parent who would give verbal consent to allow the experiment to be conducted on their children.
Materials
In-order to conduct this experiment only two materials are completely necessary, those would be a pen/pencil and paper. More materials could be used in order for the results to be correctly gathered, such as a recorder and pre-written out questions so one can be sure to ask the same questions with all the subjects.
Procedure
The age groups were first assigned with the experimenters volunteering for the group they wanted the most, if any one group was too large or too small experimenters were asked to change their decision in order to create a more balanced groups. Since the experiment simply consisted of interviewing the subject, a variety of methods were used to do so. First all the experimenters would ask the child’s parent/guardian for permission to conduct the interview in the first place, after permission was granted the experimenters then continued to conduct the experiment on the subjects. The experiment was conducted in many