How long will your survey take? Photo: MarutStudio/Shutterstock Here's a post for producers of research (especially students who are designing their own surveys). I'm a fan of the Pew Research Center's polling website, in part because they are transparent about their methods, and in part because they share educational content about how to do good …
Continue reading Producer focus: Estimating how long your survey will take
This project provided several frequency claims you can analyze. Photo credit: LukaFunduk/Deposit Photos Before you read on, take out a pencil and draw the Apple logo (no peeking at your own device!) Now try to draw the Adidas logo, too (no peeking at your feet, either). Which one was easier? How confident are you in …
In 2020, Netflix released an 8-episode series called "100 Humans" in which 100 (American) humans from a variety of ages and social groups participate in a series of studies. It's a gold mine of examples for critical thinking in research methods. You'll find examples of posttest-only, pretest-posttest designs, HARKing, ethics, and more. Most of the …
Photo: fotogestoeber/Shutterstock More than ever, our citizenry needs skills for information literacy. A recent study of almost 4000 U.S. teens, conducted by Stanford's History Education group, concluded that teenagers' ability to think critically about online information is "troubling." Their report included the findings that: Fifty-two percent of students believed a grainy video claiming to show ballot …
The effect of screen time on well-being is likely to depend on moderators such as what's on the screen, when it's used, and who's using it. Photo: Eric Nathan / Alamy Stock Photo I can't promise this is the last article on screen time research that I will blog about. But this long-form piece by …
A list of recent articles that are student-accessible (updated January 2024) Compiled by Beth Morling and Jeong-Min Lee, Georgia State Our students have used these articles in their final projects for Research Methods in the past. In this final project, students summarize and analyze the validities for two empirical studies. (I can provide the assignment …
Here's a second video in a series by Pew Research. This 5 minute clip describes some of the issues in writing good questions for an opinion poll. It basically summarizes the first part of Chapter 6, and provides some new, concrete examples. You can use this in combination with Pew's first video about random sampling, …
When the general public critiques research, I often hear them say that the samples are "too small." It's true that sample sizes (N) in psychology research should be large. One of the outcomes of the so-called "replication crisis" is that large samples are more and more important in psychology. But why? A common misconception--held by …
Credit: IFLA.org (Open source image) Most research methods instructors hope their course will teach students to be better consumers of information. They want to not only help students read empirical journals; they also want to help students become critical thinkers about anything they encounter in the "real world" of the Internet. Maybe you'd like to …
Continue reading Start next semester with a fake-news lesson
Pew Research is my favorite polling resource, partly because they ask such interesting questions, and partly because they are so transparent about sharing their methodology. (For examples, see their Methods page or click on the full Report Materials for a study they did on gun ownership in America.) They make their sampling techniques and question …
Continue reading Online resource: Video about random sampling