Death Penalty Research Paper

Submitted By gijoe54321
Words: 686
Pages: 3

For my research topic I chose whether or not certain people are for or against capital punishment. Over the years capital punishment has become a huge political issue among the United States. People have argued for and against the death penalty. Some saying that it is inhumane and cruel. While others have argued that it is a necessary form of justice brought to those who commit the most serious crimes. Because of these two sides having their own strong view upon it, I decided it would be interesting to conduct my research about this topic. My hypothesis was that more men would be in favor of the death penalty compared to woman. The first known execution in the United States can be traced back to 1607, when Captain George Kendall was accused of sowing discord, mutiny, and spying against the British for Spain. He was executed by a firing squad in Jamestown Virginia. It wasn’t until 1930 when the death penalty statistics began to be collected on a regular basis. From 1930 to 1967, 3,859 people were executed under civil jurisdiction in the United States. During this period, 54 percent of those executed were African American, while the other 46 percent were white. I saw this statistic as a good variable in my research. For this study I found it most efficient to collect data via a survey. I believed it would give me the most accurate data seeing that different people have different views about capital punishment. I conducted 16 surveys during my research. There were 9 males and 7 females. If I were to do this survey over again I would have done the same amount of female surveys as male. I though it would be pointless seeing that 8 out of 9 males favored the death penalty, and 4 out of 7 women favored. So even if I were to conduct two more surveys for females, males would have still been ahead for who favors the death penalty. Also if I were to change something about my research it would definitely be the sample size. I should have conducted more surveys to get a better percentage of men and women on a college campus. My survey consisted of four key variables. They were age, gender, ethnic group, and whether or not they favor or oppose the death penalty. For the age variable, everyone in the survey filled out that they were 18 years of age. I believe that this variable became useless for my research. I should have found people of different ages to fill out the survey instead of just one age group. I believe that the product of the result would have been different. The gender variable was an important one in my study because it was the variable I