Project : Observation Journal Guidelines

Overview

Your second longer-term assignment in this course is to complete an observation journal, where you will use the previous information collected in your comparison template to apply social scientific observations to help you to develop a question about the ads that a social scientist might ask.

The work you do on this observation journal will directly support your work on your third course project, the final reflection, which is due later in the course.

This observation journal assignment will assess the following course outcome, which you focused on throughout Theme 2:

Develop questions about fundamental aspects of human behavior that inform personal assumptions, beliefs and values using evidence from the social sciences

Prompt

Your second course project is an observation journal. You have already gathered your advertisements and completed your comparison template to determine the social science approaches that are relevant to your ads.

For this assignment you will use that information to write an observation journal that will ask you to draw conclusions from the ads and, eventually, devise a social science question that you might like to investigate.

The critical elements of this assessment will be evaluated in your observation journal.

Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed and will be graded using the rubric at the end of this document:

I. Explain why you chose these advertisements forsocialscientific and personal study. For instance, what aspects of them intrigued you and made you curious?

II. Explain the assumptions and observations about human interactions and behaviors you made about the advertisements. These are some questions you might want to consider in your explanation:

a. Who do you believe the audiences for the ads might be?

b. What messages do you think the ads are sending?

c. What do you think the nature of the relationship is between or among the people in theads?

d. What relationship(s) do you see between or among the people and the product or service being advertised?

e. How effective are the ads in influencing your own consumer decisions?

III. Identify topics in this course that are relevant to the human behaviors in your advertisements and explain how they are relevant. This is your social science evidence for your observations. For instance, what ideas and people have you studied so far that apply to your observations?

IV. Taking all of your observations and objective conclusions about human behavior in your advertisements into account, assume the role of a social scientist.

What question would you ask about the advertisements that you, as a social scientist, could seek to answer? What observations and objective conclusions lead you to this question?