Project Update

April 30th, 2024: My major achievement so far in the MARC program is the completion of my literature review of the differences and similarities between how alcohol and smartphone addiction relate to sleep. My next goal is to map out my experimental design and find a mentor.

September 23rd, 2024: I swapped up some of the project organization and methods after meeting with my mentor. The main change is that I plan not to do an intervention study as they are complicated and expensive for sleep-based studies. Instead, I will survey participants and compare natural changes in sleep time and duration due to time spent on social media, video games, and reading (for fun). 

October 22nd, 2024: The project is coming along nicely. I have completed my revised experimental design and am almost done with creating the surveys I will administer. I will meet with my mentor soon to finalize these surveys and start reaching out to other Marin high schools to ask for permission to gather participants from their student bodies. Once I have my mentor's approval of my surveys, I will send off my surveys and experimental design to my Institutional Review Board (IRB) to gain approval to launch the project in November.

October 29th, 2024: My surveys and my experimental design have been completed! I am currently waiting for the green light from my Institutional Review Board (IRB) to approve my study as ethical for human participants. 

December 13th, 2024: I am almost through the IRB approval process for human subject research. They have approved my materials and I have answered their first round of questions. They are currently in the final round of deliberation. Assuming I get approval before the school year ends on December 19th, I will roll out my project at the start of the next school year when students are most likely to participate since they won't have much on their plate.

January 27th, 2025: Data collection is underway! I currently have 30 participants who have filled out the initial interest survey, and I plan to send out the daily surveys shortly. I also started drafting my write-up. I have a very, very rough introduction draft, and I am just starting to put together my methods now. I hope to have all of my data and complete my data analysis by the time I finish my introduction and methods so that I can transition smoothly into writing my results and discussion.

April 2nd, 2025: Data collection is finally complete! We had 78 people participate and 148 total responses to the daily survey, more than I ever thought I would get when I applied for MARC nearly two years ago. I have finished a polished draft of my introduction and my methods, and my results portion is close to completion. I am currently working on cleaning up, organizing, and visualizing my data so that I can perform the necessary statistical analysis. I hope to have my data fully analyzed as soon as possible to finish my results and discussion before the end of April. 

May 7th, 2025: I have finally wrapped up my data analysis, and I have a complete write-up of my research. As I finish my regular classes and head into my senior project, I have been considering what the best way to present my research is. I have recently watched many scientific presentations on a variety of topics to better understand what I believe makes and good and a bad presentation of a research paper. At this point, I do not know exactly what I will do for my presentation, but I found a few key presentations on content similar to mine through past MARC colloquiums that I will reference going forward. 

June 2nd, 2025: All loose knots have been tied up! First, my write-up: My paper has been finalized, and it would not have been possible without the help of my amazing mentor, Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, our wonderful MARC coordinators, Amy Strauss and Dr. Emily Willingham, and my peers. To me, the most surprising result in my paper is just how much time adolescents spend on social media before sleep, especially considering how sleep deprivation increases that time on social media even further. If you would like to view my findings in detail, here is a link to my paper: The Role of Sleep and Pre-Sleep Habits in Adolescent Social Media Behaviors: A Daily Survey Study. Second: I gave my MARC colloquium presentation! It was quite stressful to condense two years of work and an 18-page research paper into a 12-minute presentation for a general audience, but the night was super fun, and it was rewarding to share all that I have done with my classmates and family.