Student Web Projects

This multi-stage research project was designed to help sociology majors enhance their skills in data collection and synthesis, critical thinking, collaboration with other student researchers, and web page design -- all while exploring how national context shapes work-family linkages in a particular country.

Each group selected one country within the European Union for investigation.  These undergraduate students had little prior knowledge of their selected countries or web page design.  To prepare for the collaborative web projects, each student first created an annotated bibliography on work-family issues in her focal country. Later in the semester, each group combined the individual list of resources into one comprehensive annotated bibliography.The second stage of the project required each student to develop a coherent "story" about work-family issues in her focal country and submit a one-paragraph summary of her/his central thesis and a paragraph-by-paragraph topic sentence outline for her/his country profile. 

Then each student wrote a 10-page research report, using the following questions as a general guide:

• what are the demographic trends related to work-family issues?
• how do national policies address work-family issues?
• what are the hot research topics on work-family issues?
• what do people think about work-family issues?
• how do work-family issues vary for different social groups, such as women/men, adults/children, one-parent/two-parent families, natives/immigrants?

Afterwards, each group combined information from the individual reports to create web sites. Students were instructed to use the three broad themes of the course -- social structure, agency, and diversity -- as an implicit framework to guide the group's selection and presentation of information on work-family issues in their focal country.