Week 7: Distributing sleep questionnaire, analyzing data

Welcome to the eighth post for this project. In the previous post, I delved into an explanation of both my progress in the research paper and the progress made in the methodology. In this post I will mainly discuss the progress I have made in the data collection this week. 

In the previous post, I explained the progress being made in the methodology section of the research paper. The methodology section discusses the questions that compose the sleep quality questionnaire and the method of how the responses are analyzed. The questions are categorized under the following: sleep duration, restoration after sleep, sleep efficiency, sleep regularity, sleep environment, and lifestyle. These factors listed have been determined from my research of published sleep quality studies. I score the answers to a subject’s submitted response of the questionnaire on a scale of 1 to 4 points per question or a scale of -1 to -4 points per question depending on the question and what its answers imply for sleep quality. The points get added up and a score representing the subject’s sleep quality is determined. The sleep quality scores of several subjects that have taken the sleep questionnaire will be compared and correlated to the light pollution indexes of their reported regions. After doing so I will look for a trend that indicates a correlation between light pollution index and the sleep quality score.

Last week I distributed my questionnaire to 11 subjects. I have distributed it to 6 more subjects this week. I plan on distributing it to more subjects this weekend and reaching at least 30 subjects by the end of next week. I have conducted an analysis of my current responses and realized that there does not seem to be a significantly strong correlation between sleep quality and light pollution index of their reported regions; however, my sample size is still relatively small and I need more subjects to make a sufficient analysis.

As mentioned in the previous post, I resort to using publicly available data from NASA VIIRS which is viewable on the website lightpollutionmap.info, the most recent data being from December 2023. The light pollution index is representative of general radiance in the region, and the unit for radiance is watt per steradian per centimeter squared. The average light pollution index of the data I currently have is roughly 70.0 on a scale of 0.10 to 150. 

As I continue to collect data (sleep quality scores from subjects) this week and next week, I will be recording them and looking for any noticeable discrepancies between the data reported from the subjects living in areas of noticeably different indexes of light pollution. In addition to the data collection, which is currently the majority of my work in this project at this point in time, I will continue to polish my methodology section and finalize most of the sections of the research paper that I have been working on for the past few weeks.

Thank you for reading this post, and I look forward to keeping you updated on my progress.