Overview
Below are descriptions of the types of methodology that I will accept in this class. You may do any one of these to explore your RQ (or hypothesis, if quantitative). Your methodology section should give me the following facts:
1. Characteristics of the participants chosen (age, gender, race, what they watch, how they consume media, etc.)
2. Why this group of participants were chosen with respect to your RQ or Hypothesis.
3. What methodology from below you will employ and how, in general terms you will go about exploring it.
4. Why - exactly - your chosen methodology will shed light on your RQ or hypothesis (the latter applies if you're doing quantitative work).
Your methodology section should be at least one full page but no more than three pages max.
In the Methodology section of your overall paper, you completely describe what you are going to do to test out or explore the RQ or Hypothesis you presented in the immediately preceding assignment. So if you're doing an experiment, you would describe exactly how you would go about this. Although for quantitative or qualitative surveys I require students to contact at least 20 people, for an experiment, students need to work with at least 15 people.
Important: Every participant has to have a number assigned to them, and you must keep records of each of your participants' responses with this number, but do not place their names on any identifying material. If you choose to work with minors, I need to see written permission from their parent or guardian that participating in your study is OK (I have the requisite forms). I'll describe this in greater detail in class on Tuesday March 4th, and that's when you must tell me what methodology you have chosen and the section should be in by midnight that night.
Experiment: You would gather people and divide them into three groups, a control group and then group one and group two.
The first group of five participants is the control group. This group will not receive any interaction or modification to their environment or routine. You will simply give them a quiz on a topic that they haven't been educated about.
Intervention Group One: This group you will introduce some modification or intervention to. So for example, say you wanted to find out which type of instruction works best with short term and long term memory. You might have Group One get a PowerPoint on a topic (Group One) and then...
Intervention Group Two: This group gets a second modification or intervention. If you were looking at best teaching practices, you might give this group a teaching assistant, or flash cards, or a quiz after every concept studied - whatever, it's your research project.
Then, you test all three groups and compare how they do on an examination of knowledge, or an attitude, or belief, etc. The idea is that you're comparing the control group to two other groups, each of which had something changed about their environment or routine. You're testing whether those changes had independent and generalizable effects on performance of some metric. The idea is that you'll try to determine whether the average score of Group One or Group Two is different from the score of the control group, which experienced no change. This requires use of SPSS, which we'll cover.
Survey research (quantitative)
In this type of research, you will compose a survey of at least 20 questions to ask at least 20 people. Some of these questions will be demographic, such as age, sex, nationality, race, college, and major (if applicable to your subject of study). Others will ask participants what their attitudes are about whatever your topic is on. You will use Likert scales and participants will answer according to them (Strongly disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree, etc.). You will then try to determine if different groups on average feel differently about whatever it is you're studying. Minor participants will need written permission from a parent or guardian. This methodology requires use of SPSS. You can more easily get people to do this research if you any of the several research survey apps, such as Google, Survey Monkey or Mechanical Turk.
Survey research (qualitative)
In this type of research, you will also ask 20 or more people 20 questions, but they will be free to answer them in whatever way best suits them. What you will be trying to do is to locate themes, or similar statements that various participants make about a question. So, it is important to quote participants exactly, because everyone will respond to the questions differently. I recommend recording people but only if you receive written permission to do so (I have forms that I can give you for this, and I will require that you have these before you can proceed to the next step). Also, if you choose to include minors, you need written permission from the parent or guardian to have them be in your study. This research must be done either by voice telephone or face to face. You can text participants if and only if your subject is about texting, and you're looking at some aspect of texting itself.
Quantitative Content analysis
You will conduct this type of research if you are actually examining a piece (or pieces) of media, such as films, television shows or pieces of music yourself. For example, you might want to find out exactly how many more cuss words there are in music in the last 15 years versus before that. Or how many sex scenes there are in Oscar winning films. Or the prevalence of female pop stars versus male, or why music stars now are frequently single, rather than in groups, or why most superstar musicians now don't play music instruments on stage much (Taylor Swift occasionally does, but Rihanna, Beyonce and Billie Eilish do not. Country stars more often do.) Quantitative content analysis requires a second coder if you are making identifications that are matters of opinion (examples include whether a song lyric is sexist, or racist, or offensive, etc.) however you do not need a coder for questions of quantity or presence/absence, as these are not subject to the vagaries of opinion. For a quantitative content analysis, you will need to examine a corpus of at least ten full length films, 20 TV shows or 30 music videos. For texts, it would be at least 100.
Qualitative content analysis
This would be a rigorous investigation qualitatively into themes, presences of certain symbols, ideas or persons, or places, or ideologies that you can demonstrate are presence in the corpus of media that you examine. The above numbers would also apply to this group, but you would pull examples from the media you have chosen (please give times and scenes for films and TV shows) and discuss them in depth qualitatively.