Les Bonnes Choses

I'm teaching an intro to stats and research methods class this year, the former Psychology 282. A significant chunk of the marks for the course come from carrying out a little research project. Nothing ground-breaking, mind you. Just a little something to give the kids a chance to think about how to turn questions into experiments and run some numbers. I've TA'd the course in the past, so when it came time to write up the syllabus, I was tempted to include a requirement that the research topics cannot, in any way, have anything to do with self-esteem. When I first TA'd the course, I found every third research project I had to mark was titled something along the lines of blah blah blah and its effect on self esteem.

I was doing pretty well this year too. I had seen 7 of 9 proposals, and the only problem I had come across was one of my students was proposing to panhandle in North Toronto while wearing one of three different outfits. He said his dependent variable was going to be the amount of money he was able to collect in a day, though perhaps a more interesting thing to record would be whether he would be able to go the day without being curb stomped by a gang of thugs. Unfortunately for me, the streak ended at proposal number eight, which was indeed a self-esteem experiment. Even worse, she proposed testing whether viewing photographs of attractive models and actresses would lower women's self-esteem scores. Hmmm, do you think?

While I was waiting to hear back from the Department of Obvious Research on what they thought of the matter, I decided to find out how many times this particular experiment had been done. It seems there are several authors out there who really should have had someone like me to tell them that conducting trite research with foregone conclusions will only get you mocked in somebody's blog. However, because I am currently applying for academic jobs, I will refrain from naming any names, just in case somebody knows somebody who happens to do a google search.

My advice to the student was to throw in another factor that might interact with the body-image/self-esteem effect, just to make it even the least bit more interesting. She of course is free to do the experiment she proposed, but I suggested to her that, because there is no shortage of articles detailing the exact experiment she proposed, I would be holding her to very high standards. Even now, I'm considering just requiring her to come up with a more interesting idea.