A 250 to 500 word summary of your research project.  To be submitted in Word or rtf format.  Write these carefully, they will be graded for writing as well as for content.

You have two choices.  If you choose the Focus Group Study, you may work in groups of two or even three.  If you do this, you should each submit the proposal to SAKAI.  Trends Analysis studies should be done individually.

1.   Focus Group Study.   If you propose to do a focus group for your research you should specify:
    a.  the questions you will ask.  These should be more focused than the ones in our overgroup, e.g., you may want to focus on online courses, problems of commuter students, parking and security, etc.  You should have three or four general questions on this one topic.
   b.   the kinds of students you wish to recruit.  They should be appropriate to your question, i.e., only get commuter students if that is your topic.  You might focus on students who have children or some other specified group.  You should try to get a group of students who are not all friends, i.e., who did not kinow each other well before the group.  Try to get varied students in terms of age, race, gender and from different communities.
   c.   what you expect  to find, your hunches as to the likely results. 

NOTE:  If you do a focus group, you are responsible for recruiting at least six students, no more than 10.  They will meet in the basement of the Sociology Building during the free period on either a Tuesday or Thursday.  I will be there at the beginning to pass around a consent form and answering any questions, but I will not stay for the group.  I will give you a digital recorder, however, to record the discussion and you will give this back to me at the end of the hour.  You will get a copy of the file and will be responsible for doing a "gist transcription" (a summary of the discussion with some illustrative quotes) and writing a report..  The report may be in Powerpoint format with illustrative quotes.

2.   Trends Analysis Study.  This will use the General Social Survey 1972 to 2006 file.  You should specify your Dependent Variable which should be one for which trend data are available.  This may be the same one you used for the assignment due October 7, but it need not be.  You should also specify at least six independent variables you think are likely to be correlated with your dependent variable.  These must all be variables available in the GSS data set, you should list the variable name and description, e.g.,

65) FAM.INCOME -- In which of these groups did your total family income, from all sources, fall last year before taxes, that is? (INCOME)

This information can be copied from the software, using Microcase, do a univariate on the variable and then click on the box that says V.

After listing your seven variables, write a paragraph stating your hypotheses about how each of them will relate to the dependent variable.