University Maryland Observation of Social Behavior Project
Project Components
1. Title Page: On your title page, in addition to your name, e-mail address, course title and number, and title of your observational study, name the site of the observation.
2. Abstract: This section summarizes, or abstracts, your entire observational study. It is typically 1-2 paragraphs and highlights all of the major parts of your write-up: Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion.
3. Introduction: This is the section that introduces your topic. You are to provide a literature review, incorporating professional journal articles related to your topic. You also end this section with your specific research question and hypothesis (es).
4. Method: This section outlines exactly what you did for your observations. Who did you study? Where did you study them? How did you study them? Enough detail must be included in this section that someone else can read it and replicate your study down to the last detail.
5. Results: This is the section where you analyze your results. While this is not a statistics class, I do expect that, at a minimum, you can provide very basic statistics on your data: descriptive statistics like the mean. You should be able to compare at least two different groups using numbers. This section will also present your data analysis in terms of graphs and data tables, if appropriate.
6. Discussion/Conclusion: This is the last major section of your paper that summarizes everything you did: 1) briefly summarize your literature review presented in the Introduction; 2) Bring up your research hypothesis (es)–did your study support your hypothesis (es)/; 3) Discuss your results and present some overall conclusions.
7. References: the last page presents all of your professional references. Psychologists use APA style, however, I will not be grading on style since this is not a research methods course.
Observational Study
The topic I have choose is:
- Cell phone and driving behavior—stand at an intersection and do observations on drivers and cell phone use.Who is using a cell phone while driving?Be sure to check the cell phone law for your state with this link http://www.ghsa.org/state-laws/issues/Distracted-D… one of the following conditions:
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- Younger driver verses older drivers
- Virginia is my state
When conducting this I observed that out of 100 cars I watched 30 percent of the drivers were older verses the 70% of the population I observed were younger drivers. Older drivers- Looked to be 40+ Younger drivers- Looked to be under 40
