A Campus Poll: One Meaningful Culminating Class Project in Research Methods

How can instructors facilitate syntheses of the disparate materials that are included in typical Social Research Methods courses? How can students apply what they've learned in a systematic way? How can both coherence and a sense of closure be provided within such classes? A campus opinion poll is a useful mechanism for addressing these concerns. Some colleges are plagued with incompetent attempts to secure campus-wide opinions via haphazard interviews by student newspaper staff or through assignments made by faculty members or administrators who are untrained in methods. Sometimes questionnaires (often poorly constructed) are inserted into campus mail boxes or under residence hall doors, asking that they be filled in and returned to a brown box in the lounge. Due to their lack of sophistication in content and method, such poor techniques make any data elicited virtually meaningless. Regretably, such efforts are often perceived by others on campus as social science research and can harm the