I'm also a staunch advocate of collecting real data in Research Methods - canned data can't replicate the excitement students show at getting to test their self-generated hypotheses. One option that I offer to students is content analysis - for example, two students last semester analyzed over 100 video games from Japan and the United States, making cross-cultural comparisons involving the level of violence, types of weapons used, as well as correlations between violence level, human/nonhuman victims of violence, and weapon type. Their coding scheme was actually quite elaborate and well-thought-out. These projects tend to be admittedly a bit light on psychological theory, and it is true that content analysis is fairly rare as a methodology in published psychology research. However, the students do get experience observing "behavior" (e.g., drug use in movies, gender stereotypes in cartoons, sexual innuendo in sitcoms) in a systematic way, which I think could carry over reasonably well to coding behavior in a lab situation later. And you should see their little faces light up when they learn that they can get credit for watching movies and TV...it really gets them going. (And then after dozens of hours of coding, they come in to class and tell me they are so sick of TV, they are never watching it again. Which makes my little face light up a bit as well.)
It sidesteps IRB pretty neatly, or at least it should until these guys decide that coding cartoons threatens the privacy and safety of animators... (Wasn't there a case recently of a school deciding that IRB review was needed for ARCHIVAL RESEARCH?? Research ethics are incredibly important, but honestly, that goes way over a line...) -- Dr. Michelle Miller Assistant Professor Department of Psychology Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86001-5106 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~mdm29/ NAU Department of Psychology: http://www.nau.edu/~psych/naupsy.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
