Sociologists often use interviews, surveys, and experiments as methods for collecting data. You and your partner’s task is to create either a simple survey or experiment (to be conducted in class) that might either support or disprove a hypothesis of your choice. If you create a survey, use google forms to easily distribute to your classmates. If you conduct an experiment, you can record your data however you want (observations on notebook paper, a google doc, etc). Your research sample will be your classmates (so small sample size here). Follow these steps and answer these questions on notebook paper…
- What is your hypothesis (what correlation do you believe to exist)?
- What is the theory your hypothesis is based on?
- Create your survey/experiment. Survey’s should be short (5-10 questions at the most). Keep this in digital format so that it can be easily accessed by your classmates on google classroom. Experiments should be able to be easily conducted in a matter of minutes with classmates.
- Conduct survey/experiment (we will do this as a class).
- Collect & analyze data (type this up)
- What are your findings (summarize your discoveries, correlations, etc).
- What were the limitations of this research that might affect how valid the results are?