If you were writing a paper on, say, the gay experience at Shepherd College, you could interview gay students, straight students, faculty members, administrators, and anybody else who could give you a part of the whole picture that you were trying to paint. An observation project requires you to act as a neutral observer of the phenomenon you are studying. You can observe classrooms, family experiences, leisure experiences, behavior in public places, or anything else that will increase your understanding of a topic or phenomenon. Make sure, though, that if you do observe something you get whatever permissions are necessary to keep you from being arrested. A case study uses a combination of interviews and observations in order to study a single individual example of a phenomenon.
Case studies are excellent for looking at the way that large issues affect individuals.
A survey is a questionnaire that you administer to a representative sample of people in order to gauge their opinions, feelings, experiences, or understandings. A survey must be well designed in order to ask the kinds of questions that will actually produce meaningful results, and it must be administered to a well-chosen, random group of people in order to assure that the results are representative. The experiment is a kind of fieldwork in which a hypothesis is tested in a staged environment that controls as many variables as possible. Many experiments take place in a laboratory, but it is also possible to conduct field experiments in social behavior. The key is that, as the experimenter, you control certain variables that allow you to narrow the interpretation of the results.