Population for My Proposed Research Will Be

¶ … population for my proposed research will be college students ages 17-22 at three different educational institutions. The purpose of the cross-sectional study will be to survey the study habits of college students and the effect of those study habits on student's grades. Students will be asked to identify themselves on the questionnaire in terms of their age, gender, ethnicity, college major, whether they are the first member of their family to attend college full-time and their GPA. They will then be surveyed upon a variety of study habits, such as what time of day they study, where, how frequently, if they study alone or in a group, if they study with music playing and for how long.

All of the categories will be narrowed down in the final statistical analysis, for ease and clarity (such as noting if their major is in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences). GPAs will be rounded up to the nearest .5. The students will be randomly selected at the university. One thousand students at each college will take the survey. This sample size is designed to be large enough to minimize the influence of other factors that could impact survey results, such as a negative family or health situation that could impact a student's GPA for a semester.

The research instrument will be developed by the study designer. The content areas that will be addressed will focus on how students study, to assess the impact of those study habits on grades. The results will also be segmented, to see if student's majors and other demographic factors are correlated to specific tendencies in study habits, or if certain study behaviors more positively or negatively-affect certain groups of students. For example, are girls more or less likely to study alone, and are girls who study in groups negatively or positively impacted by this choice to a greater or lesser degree than boys? The study samples from the different universities will not be balanced to reflect equal proportions of all of the demographic areas that will be considered, however, and instead make use of large numbers to ensure that the populations are representative of general tendencies amongst college students.

The survey will initially be field tested on a population of one hundred students at a single university. Students in the initial test population and in the final study will be asked to rate, on a scale of 1-10 if they frequently study alone, study in small groups, or study in large study groups; if they frequently study listening to music, frequently study while watching television, etcetera. Given that the single-stage survey attempts to understand student's study habits in general, it will not follow specific students over the course of their academic careers in a longitudinal fashion, and will thus use a cross-sectional method to understand how habits and demographics intersect.