The Basics of Quantitative Reasoning
As us freshmen are going 1 month (strong?) into university, I’d thought I’ll use this medium to document my progress particularly in a University Scholars’ Programme (USP) module that I am taking this semester, UQF2101J: Pursuit Of Happiness under Dr Charles in the National University of Singapore (NUS).
I have to admit that I was initially apprehensive about taking a quantitative reasoning (QR) module this semester, as I was already taking GER1000 and ST1232, both modules heavily based on statistics and data. But I am glad I did! Dr Charles introduced a very different learning style, completely different from what I’ve ever done before. In this module he emphasised the importance of the four nodes of QR: topic, data, analysis and software.
I’ll share a mini project I took on earlier this semester, as I thought that it is extremely relevant now, as I’m sure many of us are drowning in school work already…
So 2 weeks ago I conducted a survey based off of SPANE:
The SPANE is a 12-item questionnaire including six items to assess positive feelings and six items to assess negative feelings.
Firstly, to tackle #topic: I wanted to test if the mantra ‘enjoy school, work life will be even worse’ preached by many adults, was true (though personally before the results I felt that this was untrue…). As many of my friends in the QR class have also sent out surveys, I wanted to give the class a lil’ break, and so I sent out the survey to my family members (working adults) and my peers who are not in the QR class. This was because I wanted my respondents to be from different schools and universities so that the data for students would be more representative of the entire student population. (I also managed to get my friends to send the survey to their family members as well, so huge thank you to all who participated). Given the nature of my topic, I thought it was only fair that I had reached out to a similar number of adults and students so as to allow for a fairer comparison. Here is the demographic of the people who did my survey:
note that I classified the sole person who labelled themself as ‘entrepreneur’ under ‘working’ in my results later on.
Now on to #data and #software. Basically, for positive emotions, a higher score the better, and for negative emotions, a lower score the better. Here’s a graph I managed to plot after taking the sum of each emotion for those working and schooling after feedback from my professor, Dr Charles, that my visual representations that I previously created for my collected data could be worked on. I also used excel to plot these graphs, given that my dataset was already conveniently located on my excel spreadsheet. (I would also like to add that before this, I did not even know that excel could plot graphs… but I’m currently playing around with tableau… I’ll hopefully make another post about my tableau journey soon!)
I tabulated the sum of the scores of each different emotion for those schooling and working. As you can see, those studying generally had a higher total for positive feelings, and a lower total for negative feelings. Oh and I also tweaked the scale for the vertical axis, if not the differences could not be seen clearly.
Here is a table on the means of the different spane values, in which I will move onto analyse.
#analysis:
Really, the older the wiser! My thoughts were proven wrong (oh no…). The spane-p mean of those in school (22), was greater than that of those working (20). This meant that students generally feel more positive about life than working adults.
The spane-n mean of those in school was very slightly lower (few decimal places) than that of those working, meaning that those working have a higher negative feeling score. Naturally, the spane-b of students is higher than that of those working.
Some plausible reasons for this outcome:
- Even though students are faced with homework, projects, etc, they are still able to converse and interact with friends, have long school holidays, and partake in co-curricular activities of their choice. Paying bills, settling taxes are not yet the responsibility of us students, as all we have to do is study since most students are still supported by their parents. Students also generally have more free time to hang out with friends, and with the advent of social media, have more platforms for creative expression and entertainment.
- For those working, not only does one have to deal with the entire concept of adulting, one also has to deal with politics in the workforce, a cutthroat work environment, and things can get especially bad for those who do not have a single interest in the scope of their job and are just working merely for a steady income. All these could lead up to heightened stress levels.
However, my experiment does have a few loopholes:
Given that this experiment was conducted during the covid-19 situation, many adults are still working from home (WFH). Majority of the adults I know dislike WFH and prefer interaction with colleagues. Or perhaps some people do enjoy their work, but are struggling with other issues like family problems, that might affect how they are feeling. Here, Dr Charles then emphasised the need for statistical certainty and I’ll be sure to work on that on future projects. One of my classmates in the QR afternoon class, Verlyn, also pointed out that generally, the people who make time to answer my survey would be the more optimistic ones since they were able to set aside time and are not drowning in schoolwork yet… which I think she makes a fair point (haha!).
Also something extra that I noted from my survey…
NUS students tend to be happier than students from other schools… Maybe because we have a more vibrant student life, or a more diverse set of modules (like this one!)? :)
That’s all I have for this post, thank you for reading up till here and see you in my next!
