Week 8: Statistical Analysis and New Findings!

Hey everyone, welcome back to my senior project!

This week I moved further into analyzing my data and started running tests to see if the patterns I was noticing were statistically significant. After organizing all my data, I conducted a t-test to see if there was a difference in overall agreement with hoarding misconceptions between males and females.

To my surprise, there was no significant difference, which went against my original hypothesis. I had expected females to agree less with misconceptions than males, because according to one of the studies I read (“Are women more empathetic than men? Questionnaire and EEG estimations of sex/gender differences in empathic ability” by Chenyu Pang et al.), women were proven to show higher levels of empathy than men. However, my results suggest that sex does not play as big of a role in perception of hoarding as I initially thought.

I also conducted a one-way ANOVA to compare overall hoarding perceptions across the different age groups. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the groups, but to find out where those differences were, I had to run a post hoc test. I found that the biggest difference was between adults and older adults, with older adults being more likely to agree with misconceptions about hoarding. One possible reason for this could be that older generations may have grown up with less awareness around mental health, so behaviors like hoarding might be more likely to be seen as personal choices rather than psychological conditions.

The teen group however did not show a significant difference compared to other groups. Last week I had mentioned how teenagers are still forming opinions and may not have strong or fixed beliefs yet, which helps explain why their level of agreement with hoarding misconceptions is not reliably higher or lower than the other age groups. Right now, I’ve started analyzing differences between ethnicities and kinds of past experience, and plan to finish that by the end of this week.

For my research this week, I continued reading Buried in Treasures by Frost. The next part of the book focused on providing strategies for understanding and addressing hoarding behaviors. Now that I’m almost done analyzing all of my sources, I have started writing the literature review section of my research paper.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!