Problem

How will people react to happily dancing teens in public places? What key variables may affect peoples’ reactions to the silent rave? The purpose of this research is exploratory.
Operation
The variables are:
• Intensity of the dancing
• Venue (private enterprise or public area)
• Crowd density
• Age of bystanders
• Whether the music is audible to the public

The study could have been more informative if the ravers had been older—perhaps near middle aged. Still, the concept of this experiment has remained constant.

Hypothesis

We have agreed that most bystanders will feel uncomfortable and confused. The primary variables in this hypothesis are crowd density and general crowd age. Some may laugh or smile, and there is a slim possibility that someone will join the dancing. We framed our hypothesis around the assumption that when people do something that is not unorthodox but in an unorthodox setting, bystanders generally express passive interest or confusion. If the dancers seem friendly rather than aggressive, people may feel inclined to try to be humorous and join the silent rave. We have no prior experience with research like this, so this is a self-developed hypothesis.

Research Design

• Mode of Observation

We used participant observation to determine our results. We may have been able to gather more hard evidence if we had surveyed the people who saw our rave.

• Sample

The entire population of elements was used in this study. The bystanders consisted primarily of younger and middle aged people. Another setting of this experiment was conducted by a school where there were predominantly middle and high school aged teenagers. It is fairly likely that other studies would arrive at similar results.FindingsAll of the tested adults, with one exception, were aggravated by our dancing. One man working in a restaurant accepted our enthusiastic dancing without anger. A man behind the liquor counter of Trader Joe’s market said harshly and simply, “Guys, get out!!” however, during our rave down the street in front of a middle school/high school, most of the some hundred kids eating lunch yelled in excited support. Two or three joined the dancing for a few moments. Therefore, age makes a crucial difference in response to taking a rave out of a dance club and into the public eye.

Conclusions

People do not like teenagers behaving abnormally in public. Our findings would have changed had we been in a designated place to rave—then we would not be deviating from the norm. Our findings mostly confirmed our hypothesis. This study is an example that people resent other people drawing attention to themselves. Were we to conduct further research, we might pose the question, what would the results be if our music was audible? Still, people prefer to keep dancing in its place of designation.

See the video on Danielle Nisan's blog: http://dnisan.blogspot.com/2009/04/social-experiment-videos.html