Draft 1: Does Sleep Affect Your Quality of Life?

This topic submitted by Maggie Cowgill, Manda Romine, Sarah Arnison, John Kohl (romineam@muohio.edu) at 12:48 am on 10/5/01. Additions were last made on Friday, April 19, 2002. Section: Dorsey

Introduction:
When our lab group first met to discuss our student generated lab we ignored the topic at hand and discussed our weekend experiences instead. The more we traded stories early that Tuesday morning about staying out late and the amount of fun we had (or lack there of), the more we began to realize what we all had in common; we were tired. After agreeing that we were most interested in getting sleep and having fun, we based our student generated lab on a desire to determine the effect of sleep deprivation on a typical college student’s overall college experience. To determine this, we plan to survey the student body at Miami to determine which area of campus has the most active students late at night, and how that affects the student’s overall enjoyment of the college experience. For this study we are operating on the assumption that on some areas of campus students will consistently be out later at night than on other areas. We hypothesize that central campus will be the most active late at night due to the large population and density of students. We believe that results will show that sleep deprivation does have an effect on the amount of fun and quality of life a student can have. As getting an adequate amount of sleep is a factor that affects both physical and mental health, staying out late can actually hinder how much a student enjoys their college life. Also, the definition of fun is a personal opinion. We are all very interested to see what our results show about the relevance of sleep on the overall experience of a typical college student.

Materials and Methods:
To properly assess our data we have divided campus into six basic living areas. We will survey fifty students from each area of campus. Most students become friends with their corridor-mates. We will attempt to evenly distribute the fifty surveys amongst all the dorms and corridors in each area in order to prevent us from sampling only one click from an area of campus. Knowing that midterms and finals put restraints on most students social lives, we plan on surveying students over a week after midterms and more than two weeks before finals. Also, we will ask students to generalize their answers in case we catch them out of their normal routine. All surveys will be completely anonymous to keep in accordance with Miami’s rules about using human subjects. Our survey is reasonably short, and can be filled out within 10 minutes so we can collect surveys at they same time we distribute them. After surveying the mass amounts of students we can create graphs and charts to organize our data and determine any significant patterns.

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