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 Modules Three and Four:
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 for social scientific 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 the ads?
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 led you to this question?
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