Develop the testing instrument that can detect any change produced by treatment.

Experimental question: Does watching (some category of media) increase (identifiable harm) to (an othered group)? You chose what media, type of impact, and impacted group that you want to study.

Example: Does watching hypermasculine hero characters increase aggression to women (or gays, or minorities)?

Requirements: You will need to:

Select a category of media — action shows (often have hypermasculine heros), news shows (but the stories would need to feature hypermasculine men), sit-coms (often contain emotional violence), reality shows (often contain a lot of bitchiness).
Develop treatment material and control material. (Remember the control should be as identical as possible to the treatment material WITHOUT the independent aspect you are testing for.)
Develop the testing instrument that can detect any change produced by treatment.
Example: If I was doing an experiment to find out if high-salt intake increased blood pressure, then I could design the experiment to give half of the subjects
high salt burgers (experimental treatment)
and half no salt burgers (control treatment)
and test for changes in blood pressure with a blood pressure monitor (testing instrument)
to obtain a quantitative measure of change (the blood pressure number).
Basic structure of essay:

One sentence description of the research project including the specific media examined.

Paragraph explanation of most important results.

Conclusions of what you found.

Description of three things you learned in doing the experiment. This can include any areas where collecting the data could have been easier or where you had trouble analyzing the data or how doing an experiment changed your attitudes about experiments (e.g., increased trust, decreased trust.)

Appendixes

Include the treatment and the control material

Blank questionnaire.

Tally sheet (the raw numbers for each group for each question).

Chart of results.