Relationship Between Meal Plans and Visits to Dining Halls

While I was a psychology major, I was required to perform my own research experiment and use statistics in order to show my findings. Because it was meant to be an introduction to psychology research, we were only required to pick a simple topic (one that did not require the need of library or online resources). For my topic, I focused on the relationship between a students meal plan and the amount of times they visited the campus’s dining hall or food courts per week. During the time of the project, I attended Creighton University, which had seven meal options (I included an eighth, which was no meal plan), three dining halls, and one food court with six fast food places to choose from.

The goal was to see whether or not their was a correlation between a student having a high meal plan (meaning a meal plan where a student can get more meals per week and have more dining dollars) and visiting a dining hall more often. In order to collect my data, I made an anonymous survey online and posted the link on my sorority facebook page. Since it was supposed to be a small, simple experiment, I took the data from the first fifteen people who responded, whose grades ranged from sophomore to seniors. I would then record the student’s meal plan and the amount of times per week the student visited a dining hall or food court. Then, I used a program in order to find the eta (or correlation number) and the standard deviation. Since we were just beginning to use the program, we had help from our professor in order to correctly calculate the eta and the standard deviation.

The main purpose of this experiment was to learn how to do research in psychology using statistics. One thing I learned was that the subjects I used were very limited. Even though I was trying to show the relationship between a student’s meal plans and visits to dining halls for all students, I ended up only using people from my sorority, which did not help my data. Because the sorority had yet to add freshmen in, I was limited to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, who depending on which dorm they lived in (if they lived in one) where limited in their choice of which meal plan to choose from. However, I did learn a little more through this experiment and with the help of my professor on how to use a certain program in order to find the statistics in a data and how the statistics help the researcher in conducting their conclusions and results.

You can read the research paper here.