SOC 100 Research Paper

The research question that I will be investigating is: how do the demands of the college workload affect the sleeping habits of college students? I chose this topic because I feel like it has a direct correlation to my personal experiences, as well as those of my fellow classmates. I often feel as if the demands from my college workload directly affect my ability to get an appropriate amount of sleep, and so I want to research the topic to see if other students share the same experience. I believe that when I have more work that needs to be completed, I have less of an opportunity to sleep during the night. This sentiment has been echoed by many of my classmates and friends, therefore I think that this is a common situation amongst college students. In this paper, I am going to refer to a similar study, as well as propose the most appropriate method to conduct this study, which is through survey. In addition, I will be comparing and contrasting the benefits and the drawbacks of this methodology, along with this study’s relevance to previously existing studies on this topic.
Literature Review The study entitled “Pathways of sleep, affect, and stress constellations during the first year of college: transition difficulties of emerging adults” deals with questions relating to “how sleep patterns and daily salient experiences change during the first year, how these changes covariate with affective states and sense of experienced stress, and to explore the possible adaptive and less adaptive ways of coping with the transition to college” (Ari and Shulman, 2012:273). This study also dealt with questions regarding how Israeli college students’ daily stresses, including those from their workload, affect their sleeping habits and how they changed over time during their first year of college. The format for this study was a web-based daily diary through which students expressed their daily sleeping patterns and what elements affected their ability to obtain a normal amount