Week 9: Wrapping Up Data Analysis

Hey everyone, welcome back to my senior project!

This is the second-to-last week of the senior project, so things have started to come to a close. Last week, I analyzed overall agreement with misconceptions, but this week I focused my data analysis on the three categories of misconceptions my survey questions were about: seeing hoarding as immaturity, as messiness, or as instability.

For age groups, there wasn’t a significant difference for immaturity or instability, but there was more messiness. After running a post hoc test, I found that adults were less likely to agree with the “messiness” misconception, while older adults were the most likely to agree with it. Across all age groups though, the one thing in common is that they agreed the most with hoarding being related to mental instability.

For biological sex, there were no significant differences at all across any of the three categories. Both males and females were most likely to agree with hoarding being linked to instability and least likely to agree with hoarding being linked to messiness or laziness. This unfortunately didn’t support my hypothesis that females would agree less with misconceptions than males.

For past experience, there was a significant difference when it came to seeing hoarding as immaturity, but not for the other two categories. After a post-hoc test, I found that people who both experienced hoarding themselves and know of others who experienced it agreed least with the misconception, while people who know of others who experienced hoarding agreed most. Overall, people across different experience levels were most likely to agree with immaturity or instability.

Outside of data analysis, I finished my literature review, and will now be moving on to the next section of my paper. I also started working on my brochure now that I’ve identified the most common misconceptions among my participants. I also finished reading Buried in Treasures, which was my last source. Overall, my research covered a mix of topics like public perceptions of hoarding, how stigma forms, and the psychological and emotional factors behind object attachment. I feel like putting all this together has given me the information I hope to give to others through my project.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!