GROUPPAGE
Hello, We are Charlie Williams, and Marlon Linton participants in the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate
Achievement Program. Dr. Cheryl Lewis is the director of the program
located at Elizabeth City State University. We are psychology majors conducting research under Dr. Scott Bradshaw. The research is on shy persons and their recruiting others to enter social situations to cope with shyness.
ABSTRACT
How do shy persons utilize others in their social network
to help them cope with their social anxiety?
The social surrogate hypothesis states that shy persons
recruit people to accompany them in situations in which they would
not go by themselves. There has been one other study which investigated
shy persons utilizing social surrogates. The current research
further explores how shy persons utilize social surrogates to cope
with social anxiety. A questionnaire that assessed how shy
persons utilized social surrogates and the effects on the shy
persons behavior was put on the Internet and 261 people
completed the survey. The questionnaire consists of
fifteen questions that measures the reasons people recruit,
their self esteem, the persons charateristics, and other information
about the person. Analyzes will be conducted as a means to determone if there
are relationships
between characteristics of the persons completing the questionnaire
and their usage of social surrogates.