Experimentation!

Some of us remember doing experiments in school, but if you're anything like me, everything you learned about science came from this guy:

Bill Nye used countless experiments to show many scientific principles at work. In studying media effects, we can also use experiments to prove or disprove theories.

Experiments are very helpful for media effects research because they give us an opportunity to gather data that is relevant to our research under controlled conditions. In content analysis, researchers can only describe media content, and in using a survey you are simply asking people to recall past experiences which is as flawed as a person's memory.

Most often when examining the effects of the media, we seek to find an identifiable variable in the media that has a cause on the dependent variable (usually people's actions, thoughts and behaviors). Since one can measure an infinite number of variables with experiments, it is a great tool to eliminate extra variables that might also be responsible for the relationship. In a causal relationship like this, experiments are the best to observe the presence of a relationship.

Bill Nye influenced me in my love of science and even my vegetarianism! Love him!!