Identify a topic you are interested in (e.g., sports, music, cooking, or something else). 2. Write out a hypothesis that relates to your topic. It may offer an explanation about your topic or it may solve a problem about your topic. For example, a popular research topic in sociology is race relations. One hypothesis might be: The more people who self-identify with different racial groups interact with each other, the more they will build a positive relationship. That would be a hypothesis we could test with empirical data to see if the empirical evidence supports such an idea. 3. Explain the logic behind your hypothesis. 4. Using your hypothesis, write out a survey question that would represent your dependent variable and also represent an interval-ratio variable. Imagine you are going to give a survey to people and this would be one of the questions on the survey. 5. Using your hypothesis, write out a survey question that would represent your independent variable and also represent an interval-ratio variable. Imagine you are going to give a survey to people and this would be one of the questions on the survey