simfish

Can high schoolers do research in the social sciences? We hear a lot about physical science research, but what about that in the social sciences? Being the person OBSESSED with statistics and social sciences, (yeah I want to go into math/science but seriously, I am so much more obsessed with the social sciences and after the election, I was spending hours and hours checking election results and how each demographic went for Bush/Kerry) I searched for statistics on AIME qualifiers. There was a dearth of information. When Alfred Kinsey tried to search for information on sexuality, he found nothing and started his own surveys on it. While research on AIME qualifiers is not likely to be revolutionary - it still should yield some interesting information. The main problem is getting AMC to release its records - but once done then I could get some random picker program to randomly select qualifiers to calla nd such. And what about studies of USAMO qualifiers? There don't seem to be many.

WHat I hope to collect on AIME qualifiers:

1: Race (divide into categories too. e.g: how do asian males compare to asian female?)
2: Socioeconomic data (annual income, parents go to college, etc).
3: SAT scores (verbal, math). SAT II's, number of APs.
4: High schools they go to
5: How good they believe themselves to be in math (this provides interesting info).

Etc...