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This study examines the correlation between college majors and sleeping habits among Bridgewater University students, revealing that all majors have low average hours of sleep regardless of major.
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Does your major impact your sleeping habits? By: Kiley Duncan, Morgan Glasco, Bethany Ward, and Caitlin Williams
Background Students often debate that their major is harder or requires more time to complete than their peer’s majors. We decided to survey Bridgewater students to determine if their sleeping habits correlated with their major. To do this, we took a stratified sample of 50 students that were either Business, Biology, Liberal Studies, or Psychology majors. Some lurking variables for further research may be present such as; if they have a minor, if they are involved in clubs, or if they are an athlete. Chapter 1
On average, Biology majors got 6.25 hours of sleep, Business majors got 6.82 hours of sleep, Psychology majors got 6.80 hours of sleep, and Liberal Studies majors got 6.65 hours of sleep. To illustrate this, a bar graph was constructed. Chapter 2
After making a box-and-whisker plot, we could see that the Psychology major had the largest range, with the highest value at 9 hours of sleep and the lower value at 5 hours of sleep. Although the medians were all in close proximity to one another, the Business major had the lowest overall value at 4.5 hours of sleep. Chapter 3
According to the National Sleep Foundation, only 15% of teens reported sleeping 8 hours or more on school nights. In order for this to apply to our data, we would need at least 7 students to sleep more than 8 hours. We calculated the probability that exactly 7.5 students would sleep 8 or more hours, to match a 15% success rate. r = 7.5 n = 50 p = 0.15 Using this data and a binomial distribution table, we found P(7.5)=0.5935. Meaning that there was a 59.35% chance that exactly 15% of students surveyed would get more than 8 hours of sleep per night. Looking back at our gathered sample, 9 students reported getting 8 hours of sleep or more on school nights. This would be an 18% success rate that Bridgewater students are getting enough sleep. https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/teens-and-sleepChapter 6
We hypothesized that Biology majors would have the lowest average hours of sleep per night, at 6 hours. We also hypothesized that Business, Psychology, and Liberal Studies majors would have a one hour advantage over Biology majors, at 7 hours. To test this, we found the z-score of each major based on the sample means and accepted or rejected our null hypothesis based on a 0.01𝛼. The z-score for the Biology major was 2.23, with a p-value of 0.0129. This is higher than our 0.01𝛼, therefore we reject the H₀ of μ=7. The z-score for the Business major was -1.17, with a p-value of 0.1210. This is lower than our 0.01𝛼, therefore we accept the H₀ of μ=6. The z-score for the Psychology major was -1.23, with a p-value of 0.1023. This is lower than our 0.01𝛼, therefore we reject the H₀ of μ=6. The z-score for the Liberal Studies major was -2.43, with a p-value of 0.0075. This is higher than our 0.01𝛼, therefore we reject the H₀ of μ=6. Chapter 9
Conclusion Although Biology majors get a lower average number of sleep hours, Bridgewater student’s appear to get a consistently low amount of sleep, regardless of major.
