Survey Methodology
Zee’s conducted a survey across several SLU college dorms to get a feel for different student opinions on sleep. What we found was a strong trend demonstrated in the responses of almost every student we surveyed. We did discover that college students are generally getting far less than the recommended amount of sleep. However, Zee’s also discovered that students truly desire to get enough sleep, but that schoolwork and stress keeps them from this goal. Zee’s will use this trend to our benefit; it shows us that if students are enabled, they will take advantage of a full 8 hours.
Survey 1
We conducted two different surveys of SLU students of every year, including graduate students. We did the survey through Google Forms because we knew that this would be a format familiar to students, and it would condense all of the responses we got into one document. In both surveys, we discovered that students are generally getting far less sleep than needed, yet they do want to get enough sleep.
In our first survey, we got 107 responses from four different dorm floors at SLU. The questions we asked and the results were as followed:
While we were able to gather insightful information from this survey, there were some flaws in our questions and how people could answer. The first flaw was that we got some feedback saying that some of the questions were confusing in what kind of answer we were looking for. The other flaw that we saw was that many people put their own answers in the “other” box if available. Also, for one question, “How do you think sleep affects your daily life?” we got 107 different responses, which made it extremely difficult to find commonalities. While some of the comments made were very helpful, many were just individual rewordings of answers given. This made our graphics very difficult to read and understand when analyzing the statistics.
Survey 2
When reviewing the statistics from the first survey that we sent out, we realized that to get the most accurate results we needed to fix these flaws. For our second survey, we sent it out to more groups of people. While we did get fewer responses total, we had better representation in terms of the years of the students that responded. We made the questions more clear and we did not have an “other” option in order to keep the answers simple and easy to analyze. The questions and responses were:
The results of this second survey were very similar to the first, but they were, because of the survey reworking, slightly more specific and accurate. The responses still indicated that students are getting less than 8 hours of sleep on average. They also displayed that the main limitations to students getting sleep consisted of school stress and pressure from friends to stay out. School stress as a primary limitation was in alignment with our first study, but in the second survey the pressure from friends option resulted in more responses.
