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Hello and welcome to my page! My name is Laura Bialek, and I am currently a senior. It is my third year being a part of Science-Research.
I enjoy all different aspects of science and am excited to see where my research takes me!
During Sophomore year, I researched how social media affects mental health. This led me to research about the cause social media has on eating disorders. Then, I started to fade away from this subject area and lean more towards the different ways social media can alter someone's personality.
eat.22708 (2).pdfThis is the main article I focused on during the first semester of Sophomore year. It is an experimental study on how literacy intervention on social media reduces the risk factors of eating disorders.
This was my mid-year presentation based off of the article above.
This is another presentation I made for our Science-Research symposium on another article.
It is now Junior year, and I stepped away from my former topic. I found that it was getting repetitive, and I would not be able to survey people about their own mental health because of liability reasons. Now, I am starting to look at the different impacts vaccines have in various areas. I am interested in learning about the disparities of vaccinations in different areas.
Recently, I finished my mid-year presentation (the link above). I spent the first semester of my junior year working to narrow down the focus of my research. This was difficult for me to do because I was very interested in all the variables that impact people's decision on whether or not to get vaccinated. Ultimately, my research led to me realize that a statistical approach allows me to research all of the variables and compare them. The article that I presented for my mid-year project, by Daniel Kim, looked at various variables and determined the effects each had on vaccination rates.
During the second semester of my junior year I started to grow interests in the bioethics field. I am very interested in the reasoning behind certain mandates and restrictions. Simultaneously, I am still interested in vaccination rates and how they are impacted. I decided to combine both of my interests and was inspired by Dr. Caplan. The following article inspired me to conduct the experiment the rest of my proposal explains: Silverman, R. D., Opel, D. J., & Omer, S. B. (2019). Vaccination over parental objection — should adolescents be allowed to consent to receiving vaccines?
Currently, I am working on conducting a survey that answers the following questions:
Is there a relationship between vaccination choice and parental influence?
Do people under the age of 18 want the ability to make their own vaccination decisions?
Is there a difference in vaccination responses dependent upon gender?
After conducting a survey that answers the questions above, I went through the long process of receiving IRB approval on my project. I had to create a proposal form and hand out the Regeneron IRB document for my principal, school psychologist, and a community member to review and approve.
Once approved, I sent my survey to a company, and they distributed it to their large pool of people. I was able to receive over 500 responses. From there, I worked on organizing and analyzing my data on google sheets. Below is my final paper:
This is my mid-year presentation where I presented my final experiment. I also used this presentation for our symposium: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12fBwxS-HUMwHpd4WDZI8HDcj2OlT5qFo/view
Photo from the symposium:
I plan to continue my research at the University of Pennsylvania next year where I will be majoring in the Sociology of Health and Medicine.
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