貓的論文，女生比男生更喜歡貓？

Female Loves Cats More Than Male:

How Much Do College Students Love Cats?

LKY, HLA and ZYL

XX University

Abstract

This research studies the extent of college students loving cats throughtheir behavior towards cats. 160 college students (82 females, 78 males)volunteered to fill out a questionnaire according to their own situation and156 responses (78 females, 78 males) are eventually taken as samples. Possiblebehaviors with different weights were offered to be chosen by participants. Weaggregated each participant』s behaviors and generated the results by dataprocessing. As another support, we also interviewed the managers of somecat-cafés about the gender ratio of their loyal customers. We predicted thatthe average extent of females loving cats will be greater than males, since itis generally accepted that females are more caring because of their maternalinstinct. As it was supposed to be, the total score of females is greater thanmales』 and the gender ratio in cat-café is much greater than 1, suggesting thatfemale loves cats more than male.

Female Loves Cats More Than Male:

How Much Do College Students Love Cats?

Cat as a kind of adoring companyanimal, has been adored by many college students. They pet cats, feed cats, purchasecat-related products or put cats』 photos on their WeChat Moment from time totime. We try to find out how much do college students love cats. Is there anyrelation between gender and the extent of loving cats? Does female love catsmore than male?

One research that studies onthe gender differences of Human-Animal Interactions (Harold A Herzog, 2015), shows that Women, on average, show higher levels of positive behaviorsand attitudes toward animals. In many ways, men and women interact with animalssimilarly. In other ways, however, sex differences in human–animalrelationships loom large. And women are more likely to hoard large numbers ofcats or dogs in their homes. This research pointed out there』s genderdifferences of Human-Animal Interactions, and females are inclined to morepositive behaviors.

In another study, an interviewsurvey of 4180 girls aged 1-18 years, their mothers, teachers and tutors wasconducted (VK lurev, 1991). It was found that maternity instinct is inborn,but it starts to show only during the second year of life and is manifested inthe form of playing with dolls. Playing with dolls occurs subconsciously. Thismay inspire us to build a connection between maternity and females』 morepositive behaviors towards animals.

The two researches mentioned aboveboth indicate that possibly there is difference between male and female inbehaviors towards cats and corresponding behavior extent.

And due to females』 maternalinstinct, females may love cats more than males does. Therefore, the currentstudy tries to examine our hypothesis through the ways of questionnaire andinterview.

Method

Participants

Some cat-lovers in XX University were interviewed about the possible behaviors they might do towardscats, and based on which, we designed the questionnaire. 160 college studentsparticipated in our questionnaire survey. Most of them come from XX University, and some of them come from other universities. Those students arerandomly chosen no matter they love cats or not. And Some cat-café owners in (block),(city) were interviewed.

Materials

After the interview withcat-lovers, we firstly formed the draft of our questionnaire (see Figure 1), including basic information of participants like grade and gender, two corequestions 』Do you love/like cats or not-interested』, and 『Which behaviors doyou have』 (nine possible behaviors that represent different levels of loving cats).As a preparation before interview of cat-café owners, we drafted the mainquestions, such as the gender ratio of their customers and patrons.

Figure 1

Procedure

Interview and questionnaire.

Questionnaire was releasedthrough questionnaire platform. Before the questionnaire was shared in WeChatMoment and QQ Groups, we made brief introduction about our research andinformed every potential participant of possible use of the informationinvolved in questionnaire. After three-day』s collecting period, we aggregatedthe responses we got. To guarantee the gender uniformity of sample, we randomlyremoved 4 responses from those 82 responses of females. We searched theInternet and found several cat-cafés that are distributed over (block), (city), trying to contact them on whether the owner was availableto be interviewed. Interviewee were asked seven questions on the topic of ourresearch.

Data processing.

After the questionnaire was closed, we downloaded raw datafrom the questionnaire platform. However, it is string type data, which isdifficult to perform analysis (see Figure 2). Therefore, we firstly digitalizedthe data. Then we overview the data through data visualization and find outthere were 4 more females questionnaire responses than males』 in the 160responses. To make analysis fair and reliable, we removed 4 female responsesrandomly to make sure the gender ratio is one to one.

Figure 2

To show the necessity of using behaviorist theories, we alsoinclude the question, 『Do you love/like cats or not interested』, in ourquestionnaire. As the histogram shows (see Figure 3), it seems that there is nodifference between male and female on whether they love cats or not. In fact,this figure is deceptive because the question simply divides participants intothree group roughly and there are cases that some participants may not knowthemselves well thus choose an improper option when answering this question.Hence, we need to rely on other aspect of defining the level of loving cats.One possible solution is behavior analysis, which is implemented in thisresearch.

Figure 3

According to behaviorist theories,behaviors will reflect one person』 own conscience. In our case, that means thelevel of loving cats will determine the behaviors one will do towards cats. Todifferentiate the nine behaviors that we collected from interviewingcat-lovers, we assign weight value to each behavior according to its extent. Sohere comes the table of behavior-weight (see Figure 4).

Figure 4

Having the table of behavior-weight, we began calculating thetotal scores of males as well as females. The behavior score is defined asfollowed.

Expect the behaviorscores, other factors like the frequency of visiting a cat and whether have theintention of keeping a cat, are taken into consideration. Besides, the 3rd question in the questionnaire will determine what is the following questions(If 『Not interested』 is chosen, then only the 4th question would beshown. Otherwise, the rest questions except the 4th would be shown).The data of questions not being shown will be marked as -3, representing 『Notexist』. To eliminate the influence from this problem, 『Like cats or not BIAS』was introduced (see Figure 5). Having all these, the total scores of a person isthe sum of X, Y, Z and AA column in Figure 5.

Figure 5

Finally, the total scores of males and the total scores offemales were summed up and a bar graph (see Figure 6) was generated to make theresult visualized. According to this bar graph, it is obvious that the totalscores of females out weights the total scores of males. Specifically, femaleslove cat 15% more than males.

Figure 6

Results

Based on the quantitative analysis, we found that females lovecats 15% more than males, which conforms to our hypothesis. As is shown inFigure 3, male and female seem to share a similar number in loving cats. That』swhy we build our model of behaviors-weights as our reference of assessingwhether the level of participants loving cats. We adopt this model to avoidtaking one』s gut feeling as accurate information, instead, we estimate one』s featureby one』s behaviors according to Behavioristtheories - Behavior reflects the persons own conscience, which makesthe result more reliable. We also encountered some problems in this experiment,such as repeated adjustment of our questionnaire and algorithm. To refine ouralgorithm, we have access to the relevant information online, and re-processedthe data again.

Besides, according to the information collected by interviewingthe owners of cat cafés, which shows that females are the majority of bothcustomers and patrons, who are more positively interact with cats in cafés, wecan affirm our hypothesis, female loves cats more than male, as our conclusion.

References

Harold A Herzog. (2015). Gender Differences in Human–AnimalInteractions: A Review. Retrieved on28th, June 2017 from: Find a Therapist.

V K lurev. (1991). Maternal instinctand the formation of family-oriented attitude in girls-future mothers. Retrieved on 28th, June 2017from: National Center for Biotechnology Information.