To help students conduct descriptive research, you may want to use the personal advertisement coding sheet or the scale design project handouts for Chapter 5. Alternatively, you might have them collect data on the level of school spirit their school has. To see how other professors have used this activity (and to see how your school's school spirit compares to that of other schools), click here. You might also have students read transcripts of previously secret Presidential recordings of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
If you want students to do an observational study, you may want to go over this website on observer reliability. If you want them to do a content analysis, you may want to go over this content analysis website. If you want them to examine data that has already been coded and organized into a spreadsheet, you might go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics web site. To give students a light introduction to archival research, you might have them visit the Freakonomics blog , google's trend site, or the swivel site. If you want to take a more serious approach, have them go to the student tips for using the Henry A. Murray Research Archive.
Alternatively, you may want to focus on the value and the pitfalls of observational research. Three good resources for this are
Goldstein, M. D., Hopkins, J. R., & Strube, M. J. (1994). `The eye of the beholder':
A classroom demonstration of observer bias. Teaching of Psychology, 21, 154-157.
Zeren, A. S., & Makosky, V. P. (1986). Teaching observational methods: Time sampling, event sampling,
and trait rating techniques. Teaching of Psychology, 13, 80-82.
Krehbield, D., & Lewis, P. T. (1994). An observational emphasis in undergraduate
psychology laboratories. Teaching of Psychology, 21, 45-47.