Statistics W1111, Spring 2009
Project examples
Timing how long it takes various objects to fall different heights (not too exciting, but it will make sure that you have to think hard about measurement protocols).
Studying friendships and relationships: what time of the year do romantic relationships start, how many close friends do people have, how long do friendship’s last, and so forth.
Have people guess their measurements and then compare to actual values. Students doing this type of project can compare and see if different groups of people have different sorts of biases.
Taste testing: conduct a taste-testing experiment to see whether a variety of subjects can tell the difference between regular and decaffeinated coffee.
Survey question on some interesting topic. It can be hard to get random samples here. One possibility is an e-mail survey, or an in-person survey in dorms. Try to avoid convenience sampling.
A survey of some subpopulation of particular interest, for example, math majors, athletes, or students from a particular religious group.
Psychological experiments. For example, place a sign in the library study room, where eating and drinking was indeed prohibited but often done anyways.
Count the number of students eating and drinking under the and conditions, with several replications (15-minute periods) of each over a few weeks.