The Study

We wanted to study what characteristics affected how much sleep a person got. We looked at a variety of things, like exercise, gender, and health to see if there were any correlations. We conducted a survey of high school students at the Academy for Academic Excellence to help us collect this data. In total, we had 233 students answer the survey.

Our survey of 233 students had to be filtered because students were not answering questions truthfully (such as giving impossible sleep hours, insane weights, and unreachable ages). In total, we, as a group, decided to filter out 54 responses as "trolls" to have a more truthful dataset. In addition, we compared our AAE dataset to a similar study conducted by the CDC to see if our data matched their's. The CDC dataset consisted of more than 6,000 students, which made it a good representation of highschool students across the nation.

Below are links to our studies on the specific variables and how they effected sleep.

High schooler falling asleep while studying

Gender

We wondered if a students gender played a role in how much sleep they get. Maybe girls get more sleep than guys, or maybe its the other way around. We used the data to help us answer these questions.

Explore the effect gender has on sleep »

View on Weight

We were curious how people's opinions on themselves affected how much sleep they got. What we found was very surprising.

Explore the effect opinion on our weight has on sleep »

Age

Age had a small correlation in how much sleep people got. We found out that comparing grade level gave us a better correlation in the affect age had with sleep.

Explore the effect age has on sleep »

Our Findings

We discovered that there are a lot of smaller variables that effect how much sleep we get. The people that tend to get the most amount of sleep are those that are Freshmen and think they are about the right weight, otherwise their sleep is going to be effected. Overall, AAE students represented what the average highschool students slept, however, both groups are not getting the recommended 9 hours of sleep a night. Only less than 10% of those sampled were getting this recommended amount of sleep. We need to look at making changes so that the AAE highschool body gets their recommended amount of sleep.