Sleep and Bed Times Correlate Term Paper

The results indicated that there is no significant difference between group 1 and group 2 with respect to their GPA, t (172) = .623, p =.534.

Part 3

The results of the analysis for hypothesis one did not support the hypothesis. It was predicted that individuals who received greater amounts of sleep would have correspondingly higher GPAs. The results of the correlation analysis were not significant, nor did they approach significance in any way. This means that, for individuals in this sample, the amount of sleep one gets is not related to one's GPA. Whether one sleeps for 4 hours during a week or for 30, there appears to be no relation to one's GPA. These results are surprising, as one would generally believe that receiving an adequate amount of sleep would contribute to an individual's ability to function well, and thereby get good grades. There are a few factors, which could have influenced the results of this study. It could be that the relationship between these two variables is not linear, which would therefore not allow a significant correlation to be found. What this might mean is that if one gets either too little sleep or too much sleep, their GPA may suffer, and that what truly predicts a good GPA would be getting a specific amount of sleep, such as 8 hours per night. This would create a U. shaped curve in which performance is reduced at each end of the U. But optimized in the centre of the U. The inability of the correlation analysis to detect this kind of a relationship represents one of the limitations of this study.Future analyses could address this issue by conducting separate analyses that allow for curvilinear relationships to be identified. To conduct the analyses in a more simple fashion, the data could be divided into separate categories, those who received less than 6 hours of sleep per night, those who received more than 12 hours of sleep per night, and those that fall in between. Correlations could then be calculated separately for each of these three groups and the correlations could then be compared.

The lack of correlation between these variables may also be due to an error in the data collection process. The Amount of Sleep variable is supposed to represent the average number of hours a participant slept during each week, but the distribution of scores suggests that participants may have answered incorrectly, as the majority reported less than 10 hours of sleep, which, when being measured on the scale of a week, is a significant lack of sleep. It appears that the data look more like they represent the hours per night, and thus this may be influencing the results.

The results of the analysis for the second hypothesis demonstrate that there are no group differences in average GPA based on bedtime.

Another limitation that applies in general to both hypotheses is that the data used is self-report data. Self-report data is always subject to potential errors related to biases, as individuals do not always accurately remember the true responses and sometimes may deliberately alter their responses to appear one way or another. Thus, all data here should be taken with the knowledge that it.....