Color Thoughts: Word Color Association

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of my project was to determine if there were trends in how people associated certain colors with positive and/or negative words. Methods/Materials I designed the survey. I spoke to a professor and decided to use Cluster Sampling to select which group to survey. I randomly drew nine teachers' names. I submitted my research plan for how I planned to do conduct surveys. I completed the Certification of Compliance for Research Involving Human Subjects. I got approval from my Project Advisor, the principal, and teachers to distribute the surveys to the students. I also distributed surveys in to each teacher's mailbox (60). I collected the surveys and tallied the results. Finally, I reviewed the results to see if there were any similarities with how people viewed colors. MATERIALS USED: Pencils; Letters to Teachers/Administrators Asking for Permission to distribute surveys; Surveys; and Tally sheets Results I received 249 student surveys(17.4% of school's student population and 12 teacher surveys(20%). I tallied results based on whether the word was positive or negative. Blue received the highest number of student responses for positive words (18%). For negative words, red received the highest number of student responses (39%) and black (13%)was the second highest. For teacher responses, black received the highest percentage associated with negative words (32%). For positive words, blue received the highest percentage of responses from teachers (24%). Conclusions/Discussion The experimental results partially supported my hypothesis that when people are presented with a list of descriptive words and choices of colors, they will frequently associate positive words with white and negative words with black. In order to determine if there were trends in people's association of words with certain colors, I developed a survey with positive and negative words and color choices. I thought black would have the highest association with negative words. Instead, for students, it had the second highest number of responses overall compared to red; however, it had the highest percentage of responses from teachers. I also thought that more people would associate positive words more often with the color white. Instead, blue received the highest number overall for positive responses (18% from students and 24% teachers).

Awards (1)

• Second Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2014 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0405

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2014 project
• CSEF Second Place winners