Week 4: Reading and Data Entry

Hello everyone! This is the one and only Joleen, and I am back with another blog post! Last week, I finished gathering data from my interviews and surveys. This week, I decided to read some current research on how exercise impacts insomnia symptoms in menopausal women to gain a stronger understanding of knowledge in the field. I read six different research papers, took notes, and compiled them into one document detailing the findings. I will explain two of the research papers I read, their results, and why this paper will help me with my research.

The first paper I read was “The Effect of Qigong on Menopausal Symptoms and Quality of Sleep for Perimenopausal Women”. The article explained that over half of women who are menopausal suffer from some sort of sleep disorder and that sleep problems are the most frequent complaint. Their research found that low exercise is a main factor in poor sleep quality. Another important piece of information the researchers reaffirm is women have higher anxiety than men because there are hormonal changes that affect women’s psychological state.

The second paper I read was “Effects of Exercise on Sleep in Perimenopausal Women”. This research paper discussed how exercise reduces anxiety and depression, allowing people to have better sleep quality. Similar to the first paper I read, this paper also explains how estrogen changes and neurotransmitter imbalances cause people to take a longer time falling asleep. In a separate section on Qigong, the authors wrote that Qigong had a significant effect on sleep improvement in perimenopausal women because it can regulate negative emotions and improve the body’s immunity functions. When practicing Qigong, people are in a state of deep physical and mental relaxation because they regulate their breathing. This way, stress naturally decreases, and emotions are stabilized.

In addition to reading research papers, I also began to input some data into the SPSS software, which looks like an extra complicated Google Sheets file. You may wonder how I transfer information from the interview into this software. Even though I hold in-person interviews, they are not formal interviews where I ask questions and participants answer. Instead, I take their blood pressure and give them a paper to fill out. This paper contains questions that have numerical values as answers. I input numbers from the paper into each cell in the software. Each question corresponds to one column in the sheet. The process might seem simple, but I have yet to explain windows and variables next week.

Remember to come back and read next week’s blog to uncover the mystery behind using the SPSS software for statistical analysis!

Sources: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224853822_The_Effect_of_Qigong_on_Menopausal_Symptoms_and_Quality_of_Sleep_for_Perimenopausal_Women_A_Preliminary_Observational_Study#:~:text=Ping%20Shuai%20Qigong%20improved%20climacteric,sleeping%20quality%20and%20climacteric%20symptoms.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36781319/#:~:text=The%20meta%2Danalysis%20showed%20that,insomnia%20symptoms%20in%20perimenopausal%20women.