Proposal, IRB, and Survey Instruments

Brandon Brooks completed his Masters Thesis from our OU Sociology program this summer.   Brandon solidified his ideas about what he wanted to study during the spring quarter of his first year.   We worked together all summer and through the next year, going from a proposal draft to a finished thesis about 15 months later.  
    Many features of his thesis project were extremely ambitious, involving extensive data collection, and the integration of survey research with social network data collected from a newly created FaceBook app.   Brandon was initially interested in how students FB networks might change during their first year at University, therefore he designed a two stage data collection plan:   he administered the survey and FB data collection at the start and the end of Fall quarter of 2009.   The T1 and T2 surveys ask different sets of questions, but record the FB data from both time points.
    The project evolved a bit, such that the analysis reported in his thesis only relies on the data collected during the first wave of Fall quarter.   In a sense, Brandon collected far more data than he needed to perform a single thesis project, however, in doing so, he pretty much guaranteed that he would be able to ask more than one question of the data, and in the end was able to report some new and interesting results.
In two weeks we will discuss his thesis and a paper the we are revising for submission to a journal on information and society.  
   This week we will concentrate on a draft version of his thesis proposal, his IRB materials, and the survey instruments that he created.   The course drop box also includes a couple chapters from our text book that should be helpful in assessing Brandon's project.  If you have questions on the project or our class meeting this Tuesday, please post them as comments in this thread.   - Ted    [ps, that photo is actually of a different Brandon Brooks]