Research project ideas

Hi guys,
So I'm a psych major taking Research Methods this semester. We have to come up with a hypothesis (a testable question) and create a procedure for the experiment and actually conduct the experiment and get results and then write an APA style research paper over our findings.
I was wondering if anyone had any really good/fun ideas of something I could do. I can't do anything related to sex or conflict. I had an idea of testing what effect music has on a person's memory or mood. Like how their memory is affected while listening to music while studying or something like that. But I wanted to see if y'all had some really interesting ideas I could possibly do.

Wow, I've had to do a research proposal like that but not had to actually carry it out. That's intense. Since asked about something fun, music does seem to be cool. I don't know if relating it to memory would be so easy to test for. Possibly. You could test something similar by looking at how well someone does academically if they listen to music while studying by surveys. You could also see if people who listen to music while studying are happier than those who don't through a survey. I'm not sure if you need to use tested measures to be valid in this project or not. That becomes more complicated. And then there are variables too because there are different types of music and so the thing you are looking at as a constant is in fact variable. Sorry if this isn't helpful. Just thinking aloud.

You could also broaden it to find out if students with developed outside interest (like hobbies or sports or artist expression) were either happier or did better in school than others. Same for people who had more developed social interests.

I think if I were doing something along those lines, I'd be curious about the effects of social media. Like asking about the number of hours or intensity of involvement and correlate to set of other questions about happiness, number hours with friends doing activities, grades, self-image, etc.

That does help a lot! The listening to music while studying idea is what we had in mind.
I just wanted to see if anyone else had any different ideas:].

I think that it's always good to use caution when working on a research project that involves people as test subjects. Whatever you do, you need to make sure that you an objective, accurate way of measuring results and gathering data. For instance, a survey is very subjective and you have no way of really gauging if the people are learning better (they could be having a bad day, they could have not slept the night before, they could be hungry or stressed about some event coming up, etc.) Additionally with people, you need to run multiple trials because with humans, there are so many variables. From all these people, you need consent to use their results if you intend on using them in a lab-write up.

Secondly, I'm curious as to what kind of experiment you actually intend to run. Just have them listen to music and take a survey? I assume that your hypothesis would be that listening to music improves peoples' memory and learning? What is going to be your control group?

I think you have an interesting idea. I just don't know if it it's feasible to run as an actual research project or if there are too many variables involved.

How listening to various types of music influence ability to concentrate. Play music and give handouts of sheets, for example filled with different kind of letters, and ask them to cross out letter B for instance. Then see how much they can do and how precisely in a given time.

Yeah, my hypothesis is that listening to non vocal music improves memory as opposed to music with vocals. We intend to have 2 or 3 groups, the control group would be the group that does a memory test without music. Group one would listen to music that don't have vocals, like classical music and the other group will listen to music with vocals while taking a memory test. I haven't quite worked out all the details and kinks yet but that's the jist of it.

What kind of memory test? There are different kinds of memory and also in addition is concentration, which uses memory.

It does seem tricky because some people may not like classical who actually have good memories so it might affect them.

KaceFace, how are you going to be able to conduct an experiment on human subjects without having to run the proposal by your uni's IRB (Internal Review Board)? Professional ethics say that any research has to be reviewed to determine if there is a potential of harm to the subjects.

In my research methods classes, both undergrad and grad, we had to design an experiment, state how we would conduct it and predict results. We didn't actually conduct the experiment.

Because it's for educational purposes ONLY we don't have to go through all that. None of it is going to get published or anything. We have to write an APA style essay over it but it's for our professor's eyes only.

I'm suprised at how many people who have studied Psychology in this thread have said that they had to design a research study but didn't have to actually carry it out. For my undergraduate (in Psychology) and Masters (in Health Psychology) degree courses, conducting our own research project by designing, recruiting participants and writing up the study was the main assessment. Maybe it's different in the United States?

Regarding ethics, whether you intend to get your work published or not is irrelevant, you still need ethical approval when using human participants. Maybe your professor has already had it approved for the whole class, but since you are designing your own study I don't think that would be the case... But anyway, how is your project going? Have you thought about what statistical analysis test you are going to use to analyse your results? Reading your brief description it seems you would have to conduct a One-way between subjects ANOVA since you are planning on having three groups with different participants for each group. (Remember you would need quite a lot of participants for such a design). It's very important to know what statistical test you are going to use before actually doing the study.

For my Masters project, I assessed health behaviours (smoking status, alcohol consumption and physical activity engagement) on perceived future health risk (e.g. perceived risk of developing CHD and cancer). Basically assessing whether people who live an unhealthy lifestyle perceive to have a higher personal vulnerability to CHD and cancer. I used a questionnaire design and although I don't like questionnaires since I don't find them particularly reliable, it is the easiest way to get a larger sample size. For my undergrad project I carried out a lab study and it was such a chore to get the participants and bringing them back to the lab! lol.