{"id":1969,"date":"2018-06-14T20:01:43","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T20:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wagsfp.urop.lsa.umich.edu\/?p=1969"},"modified":"2020-08-28T14:10:57","modified_gmt":"2020-08-28T14:10:57","slug":"my-research-and-its-potential-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/2018\/06\/14\/my-research-and-its-potential-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"My Research and its Potential Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a <\/span>lot <\/span><\/i>of help from the lovely Dr. Rona Carter (my WAGSFP mentor and whose lab I work in during the year), I designed the study I am conducting this summer so that I could pursue my research interest in understanding the comorbidity of eating disorders and substance use disorders. Research suggests that almost half of those who suffer from an eating disorder also suffer from a substance abuse problem, which is a rate five times higher than that of the general US population. I\u2019m <\/span>fascinated<\/i><\/b> by this statistic and that is what this study will hopefully help answer a bit. In this study, I\u2019ll be looking at how the gender and intimacy of friendships in adolescence affect substance use and disordered eating in girls compared to boys. We\u2019ve chosen adolescent friendships as the means of looking at this topic because it\u2019s one of Dr. Carter\u2019s specialities and because friendships, as she\u2019s helped teach me, in adolescence are especially important to development. Moreover, we\u2019ll be looking at teenagers because substance use often begins in adolescence, and (sadly) 90% of those with eating disorders are girls ages 12 to 25. The study is correlational and will use survey data from a pre-existing, public data set. I\u2019m essentially going to investigate a variety of different interactions between substance use, disordered eating behaviors, intimacy of friendships, and gender of friends. In each of these analyses, I\u2019ll also compare the results for girls versus boys. <\/span><\/p>\n

I hope that this study will help researchers and educators better identify and understand the warning signs and causes of eating disorders and substance use disorders. On top of make sense of each disorder on its own, I hope that learn about the <\/span>connection<\/span> between the two disorders will help us better prevent and treat <\/span>both<\/span><\/i> disorders more effectively. On a side-note, while I\u2019m completely fine now, I really struggled with disordered eating in high school and I know firsthand what a difference it would\u2019ve made to be saved from that experience. The life of one of my best friends would have been very different, too. <\/span><\/p>\n

If my study (miraculously) yields noteworthy results, it\u2019d eventually benefit current and future teenagers, especially those more at risk for these disorders based on their genes or childhood environment. The study would potentially benefit the families and friends of these teens as well. <\/span><\/p>\n

However, as much as I\u2019d love to, I won\u2019t be able to look at this data along racial or ethnic lines this summer. Therefore the research will apply much more to those of the races in the particular data set I use than to other races. Moreover, again as much as I\u2019d like to, I won\u2019t have time to look at these patterns among gender non-binary or transgender individuals since I\u2019ll be focusing on comparing girls and boys since the two groups make up the largest proportion of the world population. And while the responses of those of different sexual orientations and socioeconomic statuses may be included in the dataset, I also won\u2019t get to analyze the data focusing on those differences, and so any findings we may have will probably carry different weight for people who differ in those two ways. <\/span><\/p>\n

Lastly, research ethics have played the biggest role in my research, funnily enough, in what this study is not. The original plan was to recruit participants. As I\u2019ve learned in the past month, filling out an I.R.B. (or \u201cherb\u201d as my dad likes to call it) application is a pain: especially for a research study recruiting minors to tell you, online, about their illegal activities (substance use). An IRB application is very technical, detailed, and picky. Earlier this year, I heard a debate between researchers on the usefulness of IRBs in a class; I understand much better now why this debate exists. But as little fun as filling out an IRB application is, (and maybe this is because this is my first study and IRB application but) I\u2019ve had to think about so many details and privacy and security measures I wouldn\u2019t have thought of, and so I support it. And so, in sum, research ethics have already greatly shaped my study by forcing me to use a pre-existing, already ethically approved, data set (which doesn\u2019t require IRB approval to use). <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a lot of help from the lovely Dr. Rona Carter (my WAGSFP mentor and whose lab I work in during the year), I designed the study I am conducting this summer so that I could pursue my research interest in understanding the comorbidity of eating disorders and substance use disorders. Research suggests that almost… Continue reading My Research and its Potential Impact<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1652,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,34,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-researchimpact","category-rhianna","category-social-sciences","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1652"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3044,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1969\/revisions\/3044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}