(Updated May 5, 2004)

 

1) No late papers allowed.

 

2) Include your name, your email address, the names of other students you worked with, and your TA's name

 

Here are the questions your papers should answer.  You may weave the answers into an essay (this is the best option), or you may answer them in series.

 

NEW Item:

* Please also include summary statistics on your experiment.  How many times did you do the experiment, in which places, with what kinds of subjects and what results.

 

* What was the norm you were trying to test or breach?

* What was your method for breaching the norm, i.e. how was your experiment designed?

* What did you expect to find?

* What did you actually find.  This is where you need to draw on your Thick Descriptions of interactions, your feelings, the setting, and so on.  Report on your own experiences, report on how you perceived your partners.

* What do your experimental results tell you about the nature of social rule you are trying to study?

* If you adapted and changed your experiment in any way, describe the changes and the reasons.  In other words, don't assume that your initial plan was 'bad', but rather report on the evolution of your plan as an adaptation or learning experience.

* Did you find anything surprising or funny?

* How did peoples' reactions to the breach differ?  Be as systematic as you can about this.  Are there differences by race or gender or class or age?  How about social setting or time of day?  If you don't have variability across these dimensions (and you couldn't possibly get sufficient variability across more than a few), think about how your limited research framework may affect your results.

* Did different members of the group get different results?

* In what ways did your experiment NOT work, and why?

* How would you have done the experiment differently?

* Based on your own experience, what do you think can be learned by breaching experiments?

* What does your experiment tell you about the nature of the norms you are studying (or other norms that you didn't plan to study but found yourself confronted with).  This is the analytical part of the paper.  Don't let Babbie's textbook make you believe that you can't draw conclusions from ethnographic work: you can and you should.

 

Projects will be evaluated based on the creativity and persistence of the experimenters, the ability to incorporate some theoretical ideas from Goffman, and the strength of the analysis.  Written reports should be 8-12 pages in length.  Each member of the group must write a separate paper.