Intimate Contact

Jason Lawson

Aaron Berger

Seminar Power Point Paper

Jason and I decided to monitor physical contact between couples of different ages to see what age groups were more intimate. To do this, we went to the balloon glow, which was too windy so they didn’t do it, but we, and many other people were still there for a while. There were several couples that we could observe from being behind them and following them for a few minutes. There was also a few couples that we didn’t follow or observe because they were just walking past us when we got there pictures. One couple sat on a barrel for all of the three minutes we observed them, and some others walked and stopped to look at the balloons that weren’t glowing.

We saw and got pictures and tried to observe about nine couples. There were about four couples that were teenagers or very young. We caught only about three middle aged adults, and we even got pictures of two different elderly couples. Needless to say the teenagers were a little more on the intimate side of things while the elderly or middle aged adults just held hands or interlocked arms.

What we did was try to watch each couple for three minutes and record their intimate contact with each other. After watching a few couples we set up a few different types of touching that they seemed to be going by. We checked to see if the couple did any of the several things in the three minutes. The list is as follows: Hand holding, Hugging, Arm around the waist, Interlocking arms, Cuddling, and Kissing. Those we thought ranged from the least intimate to the most intimate.

In the Teen category we found that they exhibited more intimate behaviors like kissing or cuddling or arms around waistlines. There were a few adults who did some of that stuff, but most of them had kids to take care of or push in the stroller. One older couple of the two walked by us with their arms locked at the elbow like they were going down a wedding aisle. The other older couple mainly just held hands. That says that they love each other, but they just weren’t as frisky as the younger folks. Now we don’t know what happens when all of these couples aren’t in public, but all we know is that based on our data taken at the 1999 Balloon glow, for about three minutes at a time, the younger the couple, the closer the bodies were. They hugged and held each other when paused to watch balloons, whereas the older the couple, the less they got intimate with each other. All of the exact data is contained in the power point we did and we made bar graphs of each of the three age groups showing how many out of the couples in that age group committed what acts. For instance there were four couples in our teen group, and three out of the four kissed at some point or another. Actually, I think the group that didn’t kiss may have been one of the ones that was walking past us and we didn’t observe them for the full three minutes. So it could have been four out of the possible four that kissed in that age group. We did though, only see three kisses or pecks on the cheek. So anyway all of that data is displayed as three different bar graphs at the end of our power point presentation if you want to look it up again.

Overall we had fun and learned a little bit. It would have been better if it wasn’t so chilly or windy and they could have done the real glow but mother nature always has the final say.