Research Questions and Reading Comparison

Questions
1) What is the main purpose of student use of social media and what is the impact of this use on the effectiveness of advertisements? Breaking down the use of social media to connect with peers, keep up with news / events, or for entertainment purposes. Comparing these priorities to how students react to advertisements that are primarily, funny, informative, serious, or involve advertising based on celebrity appearance or a peer connection.
2) While using social media, how to students react to certain types of media and how do they react to ads that follow a similar pattern? Are students more likely to create or spread funny posts, serious posts, etc.? How does the likelihood of a student to be involved with certain types of media impact how they react to advertisements that follow a similar pattern?

In order to gather information to help answer these questions, I would ask students questions designed to help inform me about how they would react to each different focus of social media. This would be done through asking them directly if they are more likely to spread something they consider funny, serious, informative, etc.. To help understand how these preferences impact the effectiveness of advertisements, I would ask them how they would classify the last advertisement they remember seeing on social media and how they reacted to that advertisement. In addition, I would ask about the last effective and ineffective advertisement they can remember from social media. These questions could be posed in a mixture of multiple choice and short answer format. Multiple choice would allow me to narrow down the use of social media by students and how they prioritize different aspects of social media while short answer would help gather information about reactions to different advertisements.

Comparison
Although both articles cover economics and bagels, and do so in an academic nature intended to inform the reader, they cover to different subjects entirely in their actual content. The reading from Freakonomics covers how a bagel company can be used to examine the moral fiber of corporations and the association of this knowledge with white collar crime. The paper by Levitt by contrast analyzes profit maximizing choices that are made by firms based on the example of the same bagel and donut company. Although the papers have different focuses, they use the same data and they both set out to inform the reader about a larger issue that can be distilled into a pure form and related to concrete examples given by the simple bagel business that Feldman started.
In terms of organization, the paper by Levitt follows the IMRaD structure more closely, while the reading from freakonomics is less formally structured. Levitt uses a clearly labelled abstract, introduction, and gives models and examples of data and how it relates to the issue he is exploring. In contrast, the freakonomics reading does all of the same things, except providing literal charts analyzing the data. Both readings offered an abstract or point, provided a background, and then used data from the bagel business Feldman ran in order to relate an abstract or general idea to concepts and proofs provided by a real world business.