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What are the ideas that worked well, then?
Somne of the best projects came from psychology students who were working on experiments [link to experiment definition] for courses in their department. One strength of these projects were that they were motivated by specific research hypotheses [link to definition of research hypothesis] of interest and were not simply data-collection exercises. By thinking of a research goal or hypothesis before designing you study, you will be less likely to gather unanalyzable data.
For example, in the study mentioned above, if the students were asked to come up with an interesting hypothesis, they would have to go beyond simple ideas such as "people with different religions have different marriage plans" (yes, that is a research hypothesis but not a particularly interesting one).
The data you gather can be more than just numbers. When students conduct surveys, often the most interesting data are qualitative free-form responses. For example, a student survey about textbook-buying habits included the following responses: " I use the Columbia bookstore even though it is more expensive. There I can use my Columbia Card Flex points. This way my loans, rather than I, pay for the books. " "Labyrinth would be even better if they got rid of the pseudo-intellectual staff who know that Lacan is in a separate ``Lit Crit'' section, but still get paid the same as Mickey D employees." It is perfectly acceptable to gather qualitative data [link to definition of qualitative data] and then code it for a statistical. Direct observations are another source of the interesting and unexpected. For example, John Stilgoe describes some project ideas from his classes in landscape history at Harvard: "One [student] has just noticed escape hatches in the floors of inner-city buses and inquired about their relation to escape hatches in the roofs of new school buses. Another has reported a clutch of Virginia--Kentucky barns in an Idaho valley and wonders if the structures suggest a migration pattern. A third has found New York City limestone facades eroding and is trying to see if limestone erodes faster on the shady sides of streets. A fourth has noticed that playground equipment has changed rapidly in the past decade and wonders if children miss galvanized-steel jungle gyms. Another has been trying to learn why some restaurants attract men and women in certain professions and repel others, and another (from the same class years ago) has found a pattern in coffee shop location. Yet another reports that he can separate eastbound and westbound passengers at O'Hare Airport by the colors of their raincoats." |