The Correlation of Sleep based on Working and non-Working students

Group 7

Alexis Morales, Alexandra Guillen, Ana Vest

EDT 180 D T, TH 3:00- 4:15pm

Gary Lewallen

25 April 2019
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We decided to research the correlation of sleep between working and non- working

students here at Arizona State University West. We chose to research this topic because we know

that most college students must work to pay for their necessities and wanted to see if that was

affecting their sleeping schedules or not, including outside factors. To start off we created a

google docs form to ask students certain questions that would help us identify the correlation of

sleep between these students. The following questions were asked; 1). What grade are you in? 2).

Do you live on or off campus? 3). Are you part-time or full-time? 4). Do you currently have a

job? 5). How often do you feel you get a good amount of sleep? 6). Do you feel that work makes

it difficult to get enough rest? and 7). What other things contribute to your lack of sleep? Using

these questions and the google docs form, we were able to collect 90 responses from participants

and put them into an Excel spreadsheet. From the spreadsheet we then were able to separate the

collected data and create charts to get a better look at the results.

To start off we created a chart for each question to better display our results. That way we

were able to compare the answers to each question to determine the correlation of sleep based on

working and non-working college students. The first question had to do with grade level as

displayed on the chart below. Out of the 90 responses 51 students were freshmen, 21 were

sophomores, 13 were juniors and 5 were seniors. As a result, more than half of the students who

participated in the survey were freshmen in college.

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Before asking some sleep and work-related questions we needed to see If these students

were full time or part time and we concluded that 96% of the responses were full time students.

That means that 4 out of 90 students are only part time which often means they work since it’s

less classes. Full time students typically have 4 or more classes depending the credit amount per

class and any student taking 12 or more credits is full time. This let us to assume that the 4 part

time students are taking less than 12 credits and/or 1 to 3 classes.

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Considering grade levels, we decided to see how many students in each grade lived on or

off campus. Once the data was collected, we could see that all seniors and most juniors and

sophomores lived off campus. 1 out of the 13 juniors, 4 out of the 21 sophomores and 30 out of

the 51 freshmen lived on campus. In total, 55 out of the 90 responders live off campus which

most likely means they commute to get to school which could mean they work and either lack

sleep or get enough sleep. Comparing the results, we can see that most of the students live off
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campus even though half of the responders were freshmen as shown on the chart below.

After seeing how many students lived on and off campus, we created a chart to see how

many students based on grade levels often feel well rested. As one can see on the graph, a greater

number of students living off campus sometimes to rarely ever feel well rested. There is a huge

gap between often and sometimes/rarely for both students living on and off campus; however,

there is a greater gap in students living off campus. That often involves other factors that require

the student's attention such as other responsibilities. Looking at the results based on grade level,

the freshmen students were the only class to have some students respond that they never feel well

rested and the seniors were tied on students who often to sometimes feel well rested. These

results are likely because there were only 5 seniors and 51 freshmen, which is a huge gap.

Overall, 48 out of 90 students sometimes/often feel well rested which is a little more than half of

the students.
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Since a little more than half of the students responded that they sometimes/often feel well

rested that means the other half rarely/never feel well rested and this question determined if they

work or not. 33 students said this question does not apply to them, meaning they don’t work.

The remaining 57 students work and 35 of those students said work affects their ability to get

enough sleep. That is more than half of the working students who feel that work makes it

difficult to get enough rest, so we made sure to include a question that responds to how often

they work.
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We asked students who work about how many hours a week they work and created the

chart below to show the average and maximum number of hours these students work a week.

The average came out to 13 hours which realistically tends to be between 10 to 15 hours a week

and the maximum is 45 hours a week. 45 hours a week to work is a workload to handle

especially for someone who is a full-time student and even part time. This contributes to our

research in respect to correlation of sleep based on working and non-working students.

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Although the amount of work hours allowed us to relate sleep and work, the students who

don’t work could also feel that they don’t get enough rest too often and there is a reason for that.

We had 33 % of students say it was due to homework load, 23 % was due to family, 28% was

due to stress, 7% responded partying and 9% said other which is unknown. As shown on the

chart below, the biggest contributions to lack of sleep is because of homework, stress and family.

Each response could easily tie into each other, but those biggest factors are the most common

and could even overlap with each other.

Now that we have looked at our charts and data, we’ve concluded that there is a correlation in

sleep based on working and non-working students because overall half of the students said something

got in the way of their ability to get enough rest. There were things we would change if we did this

again. We would have a few more questions and make them more specific so that we didn’t have to

take a ton of other factors into consideration. A huge factor we would change would be the amount of

surveys and for each grade level and age. There was probably too big of a gap between freshmen and

seniors who responded to the survey which would explain some of the big gaps in responses or not
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enough gap in other responses. Frequently freshmen students don’t work and since there were more

freshmen than any other grade level who responded to the survey that would also explain some bias in

the results which is why we would change a few things the next time this research would be performed.