you are to engage in an unobtrusive observation assignment, and then report your method and results; you are to conduct an OBSERVATION only. Come up with a research question that can be answered through active but unobtrusive observation(call it "people-watching" if you like). You are to answer your question by watching something happen, documenting your research, and interpreting the results to come up with some kind of conclusion. Your observation may not be "observing" documents and statistics. You are not to approach or interview anyone for this assignment. Explain your methods- the how, the what, the why- and come back and write essentially a report on what you wanted to find out, how you conducted your observation experiment- and whether you answered your question. Here is an example of the kind of unobtrusive observation you may conduct: -- One student wondered whether men or women were more likely to return shopping carts to the cart corrals at a particular grocery store. She sat in the parking lot for an hour (on two separate occasions) and tallied up whether the shoppers with carts were male or female, and whether they returned the carts to the corrals or left them in the parking lot.