Research help please?

Question

I have to find a research project to do for my social science course, I have searched everywhere for one I can do myself at home but cant find one. I have to be able to compare it with a published research document. My original idea was childrens gender perceptions but I could find no published research on this. I can do anything to do with crime, children, gender, people and organisations and anything to do with Psychology or sociology. I have to find something relatively easy because I hand it in next week. I need to use interview methods, questionaires etc qualitative and quantitative methods. I really hope someone can recommend a way to do this because I will fail my course otherwise. Thanks so much

Answer 1

The reason you can't find much on the subject is because beyond the higher level university stuff, it's really unexplored topic.

Do you mean at what age to kids begin to recognise their gender, or what makes either gender do what they do or like what they like.. A bit more info would be very helpful.

Answer 2

You have to be careful when using children in experiments for a number of reasons. Why not do something like gender differences in pro social behaviour? Maybe walk through a canteen or something and drop some books and see if it would be males or females which are more likely to help you. Or something along those lines. Unless of course you have to use qualititative methods only. But then I guess you could interview people on how they would react in that kind of a situation and gather data like that. Remember not to make your experiment flawless as if it has problems you can comment on them in your evaluation and gain higher grades for suggesting ways of improving it. Good luck.