Sociology 2155: Survey Topic and Literature Review Assignment

You need to identify a possible topic for your group project. This will be a questionnaire, designed by a group of 3-4 students, adminstered online in our class, and then analyzed in a group paper. . You need to think in terms of at least one dependent variable, two independent variables, and perhaps also a control variable. For example, you may think that parents' political affiliation(Republican, Independent, Democrat, other), along with college major, might both be independent variables that will affect the political affilitation of college students. And you might think that this works differently for males and females, so gender would be your control variable. Once you have identifed a possible topic, your assignment is to to search the existing research literature, and find 5-10 books or articles that seem related to your research topic. These should be academic sources--books from the UMD library or other U of M libraries and/or articles from peer-reviewed journals in the social sciences. You should use the search techniques that Kathryn Fuller covered in her presentation.

If you can't find five references, you will need to broaden or change your topic. Once you find those references, write up your topic, specifying your variables and then listing your references, using the format from the Citations and References guide that I handed out in class. Bring this write-up to class on Wednesday of week seven, at which time you will be assigned to a small group for this project and your group will choose what looks like the most promising topic and begin to think about the questions to include in your survey.

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