Human Behavior

• Human behavior is the study of how humans behave and what factors influence or are related to that behavior. The field of human behavior is more geared toward discovering what issues influence a person's behavior, so if you plan to do your project in this field, you should think of both a behavior and a possible influence for that behavior. The project can be implemented through research or an experiment. In either case, you should investigate how differences in the factor of interest relate to differences in a person's behavior. Some examples are exploring how a person's attitude is related to her mood (perhaps liberal people are friendlier), how culture is related to music interests (perhaps Westerners are more likely to listen to music with fast tempos) and how religion is related to a person's reaction time (perhaps the religious react more quickly to visual stimulation).
  
  

Animal Behavior

• Animal behavior is much like the study of human behavior, only applied to animals. If you choose to complete a project on animal behavior, you should follow the same guidelines as those for a project in human behavior; research or perform an experiment that can explain the relationships between specific factors and the behavior of animals. For example, you could research how different breeds of cats differ in the time needed to learn to escape from a box. You could also compare across animals, such as comparing the hearing abilities of mice and gerbils.
  
  

Psychology

• Psychology is a large field that focuses on the mental processes of people. Because of its diversity, psychology can offer many project ideas. Some subfields of psychology are well developed, offering a range of project topics in clinical psychology, cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. For a clinical psychology project, you can research the factors that lead to mental disease. If you choose a project in cognitive psychology, you can research techniques that allow people to improve their memories or reaction times. For developmental psychology, you can compare the different theories describing the stages humans go through as they age (the theories of Freud, Piaget and Erickson are the main three).
  
  

Sociology

• Sociology is the study of society. Because of the diversity of topics in sociology, you have many choices for a project in this field. To complete a project in sociology, you should either create a survey and collect data or research sociological facts through statistics. Some broad areas of sociology are social--economic classes, religion and cultural differences. Some examples of projects in this field are testing adults on high school material to see if the education system is successful, surveying people on what factors contribute to their daily stress and researching how Americans spend their money.