How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

Group C4 - Fall 2016: Briana Clark, Kiwan Lear, Elena Pelkey-Landes

EDT 180C - Problem Solving Using Digital Technology Applications
Professor Lewallen
November 29th 2016

The topic that our group decided to do our research on was how social media affects
sleep. We felt this topic was important and relevant because of how often social media is used,

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

and how little sleep college students usually get. We wondered if this sleep deprivation was
because of our need to always be on our phones? We asked seven questions, the first two were
broad, asking what gender the person polled was and also how old they were. Then, we wanted
to figure out what Arizona State school they attended(W.P. Carey, Barrett, etc) as well as how
long everyone was on social media per day. We also wanted to figure out how long people spend
on social media before bed, what social media they use the most, and how often their phone
wakes them up at night. With this information, we were able to put together information and
graphs to find out exactly how attached people are to theirs phones, the social media platforms
that take the most time out of people's day and also how it affects a student's sleep pattern. To do

this report, we used Google Docs Form. It was easy and simple to get the responses we needed
and then transport them to a chart. We got 101 responses in total.
The people that we collected our data from were mostly females with eighty-one of
polled EDT 180 students answering female when gender was asked and twenty students
answering male.

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

When looking into how many times people's phone wakes them up per week the group
found that the most commonly voted answer was once which was not what was assumed. About
80% of the surveyed population answered that they were woken up once during the week by
their phone, 15% said twice, and 3 or higher all getting around 1% or lower. The group expected
the numbers to favor the higher end or more towards the middle.
Social media's most used was the most predictable of the charts. All trending social
medias were voted as being used at rates we were expecting with Instagram, Snapchat, and
Facebook receiving the bulk of the votes with all of them being around the same area. Facebook
was the most used out of all the social medias which was expected due to the fact that out of all
social medias surveyed it has been around the longest (March 1st 2004).

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

Once
Twice
Three times
Four times
How many times a week does your phone wake you up?
Five times
Six times
Every night
15 45
0 30 60
Amount of People

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

This chart shows the amount of time spent on social media before bed. No one statistic is
favored more than others as they all have common numbers. 2 or more hours showed the least
and the most votes were in the 30 minutes to an hour area, making up a little less than 50% of the
votes.

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

Here we can see the hours that our pollers spent on social media per day. Within the results we
can find that the most common answer for our classmates was 21% saying that they spent an
average of five hours on social media daily. Coming in second is 18% saying they spend two
hours on social media daily, and third at 15% saying they only spend an hour on social media
daily. I believe this correlates well with the chart above (time on social media before bed)
because the top two options chosen were thirty minutes as well as an hour, and that is before bed
alone.

Here this chart shows the school that all 101 people are enrolled in, the College of Health
Solutions being at the top with 36.5%. Running in second there is the New College of
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at 19.2%. This chart helps up figure out the range of the
people that took our poll and the colleges that their enrolled in, this shows us that maybe if the
chart was more balanced, our results may be different.

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

The chart above shows the percentage of people surveyed and their gender. There were a
total of 101 people surveyed 81 being female and 20 were male. The extra amount of females
was veryapparent in other charts simply due to the huge difference in gender of surveyed people.

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

In
the

groups comparison of male, females and what social media type they use we got numbers that
we all pretty much expected. Obviously the female numbers were much higher simply due to the
fact that out of 101 people in the survey population 81 of them were females. Females were
charted as using all of the social medias provided more than males. Fewest people showed
interest in Pinterest which got only one female vote which was also expected.
While comparing social media before bed and times of week students wake up it was
made apparent that there is no absolute correlation. As a group we believed that the more social
media you engaged in before bed would cause you to awake more often during the week but that
was not the case. The numbers were spread out in a very unique fashion showing that people
who used social media only 10 minutes before bed could find themselves waking up as often as
those who used 2 or more hours.

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

Amount of People

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

3
17
18
19
20
21
22
Age

23
24
25
26
27
28
32
46

10

20

30

40

Legend: Blue= Facebook, Purple= Twitter, Red= Instagram, Oragne= Snapchat, Green=
Youtube, Pink= Pinterest, Light Blue= Other
This chart compares the ages of the poll takers to what social media they use most,
What we found was that 18 and 20 year olds have the most varying social media usage. They
used all the social media we asked about and others what were not specified. We also found
that the three oldest ages polled mostly use Facebook. These results were not surprising
because those age groups that had more variety of social medias were still children when social
media came about, they have had social media for more of their lives, unlike the older
demographic, so they are more familiar with it.

All in all, looking at our charts we were able to come up with the proper data to figure out
the answer to our questions. We came to the conclusion that most students do a pretty good job at
not letting their social media disrupt their sleeping schedule.We found that fifty people out of the

Group C4 - How Does Social Media Affect Sleep

101 only get woken up from their sleep once a week which was the highest amount of people.
Coming in second was the the people being woken up twice as well as the people being woken
up every night which was tied with fifteen people each. Along with that, we were able to
discover that most people were said to spend around five hours on social media per day, and the
numbers went up to seven hours (being realistic) at less than three percent. Coming in second at
eighteen percent was two hours a day spent on social media. A question that we forgot to ask was
the hours of sleep that the pollers got, this would have helped up tremendously with our
information. If we were to do this again, we would definitely need to ask the people who were
getting information from how many hours of sleep they get a night to be able to figure
everything out better.