Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction?

(Group 1)
Rose Barbera, Emma Gould, Christie Rocchio
EDT 180 Section A
Professor Lewallen
November 18, 2016

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

The topic we decided to research is does being an online student affect your physical and
social interaction. We asked questions through a Google Forms survey. The questions we asked
were what class level are you (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Post Bacc, and Graduate),
how many credits are you taking, are you an online student, how long do you spend on
electronics daily pertaining to school work, how much physical activity do you get per day, how
much social activity do you get per day, and what activities do you do outside of school work
daily? Through our Google Forms survey we were able to collect 105 responses.
The first data we were able to analyze was the amount of students in each class level. The
graph below shows the number of survey respondents per class level: Freshman (16), Sophomore
(50), Junior (35), Senior (4), Post Bacc (0), and Graduate (0). This data was able to show us that
the large majority of our survey was completed by college sophomores. We were surprised to see
that the Freshman class level had some of the least respondents because we believed that many
Freshman took this class as a first year prerequisite course.

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

The next set of data we analyzed was the amount of our respondents who were either
online students or in person students. We found that about 21% of our survey respondents were
online students, and the remaining 79% were all in person students. This part of the survey was
key to our research since we are comparing the average amount of physical and social activity
between online and in person students. So since about one fifth of our respondents were online
students we were able to gain sufficient averages about their social and physical activity.

We also decided to look at the average amount of credits being taken to see if that would
affect our results. The chart below shows the amount of credits taken by each respondent.
However, after analyzing this data, we found that the average amount of credits being taken was
about 14.59, which rounds up to about 15. We concluded that this would not affect our results
since this is equivalent to taking about 5 classes, which is a full time student. The reason why we
thought this would affect our results is because the more credits you are taking the more likely
you are to spend significantly less time being socially and physically interactive.

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

We also analyzed the amount of time that was spent on electronics daily pertaining to
school work. The results were slightly surprising because we found that through the data
analysis, the in person students seemed to spend the same amount of time on electronics more or
more time on electronics for school work than the online students. We thought initially that the
online students would be spending more time on their electronics since all of their coursework
would be online, but the results yielded some unexpected numbers.

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

The next part of the data we analyzed was the amount of physical activity online and in
person students got per day. The graph below shows a side by side comparison of the online
students and the in person students when looking at the amount of physical activity they get
daily. It was found that the in person students tend to get more physical activity per day than the

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

online students. On average the online freshman students get 1.5 hours of physical activity per
day where the in person freshman get 2.57 hours daily. The online sophomores get about 2.17
hours per day and the in person sophomores get 2.02 hours per day. The sophomore class is the
only class where the online students received more physical activity than the in person students.
The junior online students received 1.65 hours of physical activity per day whereas the in person
juniors received 2.01 hours per day. Lastly, the online seniors got about 2 hours of physical
activity per day and the in person seniors got about 3.33 hours of physical activity per day.

The last set of data we analyzed was the amount of social activity that online and in
person students engaged in daily. For this analysis we have two charts, one to show the activities
popularity by class level and whether they were online students or not and one to show the

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

amount of social activity the online and in person students receive per day. The first chart below
shows the activities popularity and the most popular activity for online students was working and
for in person students the most popular activity was spending times with friends and family. This
data allowed us to see what ASU students do in their free time and how their social interaction is
spent per day.

The chart below shows the second part of the social activity research which shows the
average amount of time, in hours, that online students and in person students engage in social
activity per day. The results were pretty much what we were expecting, in that online students
received less social activity per day than the in person students. However, the online junior class
slightly edged out the in person junior class, but other than that all the other class levels showed
a more significant difference between the online and in person students. The freshman online
students received about 4 hours of social activity per day whereas the in person freshman get
7

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

about 5.57 hours per day. The online sophomores received about 3.89 hours of social activity per
day and the in person sophomores got about 6 hours of social activity per day. The junior online
students got about 3.95 hours of social activity, barely edging out the in person juniors who only
got 3.84 hours per day. The seniors online received about 1 hour of social activity per day and
the in person seniors received about 4.33 hours of social activity per day.

While looking at the data and the charts we were able to conclude that being an online
student does affect your social and physical interactions. There was not too much difference
between the physical interactions, but the online students still received about an hour less than
the in person students when it came to physical activity. For the amount of social activity, there
was a much bigger gap between the online students and the in person students. On average the in
person students got about three hours more of social activity per day than the online students.
Our final conclusion is that being an online student does affect your physical and social
interactions and our data collected proved this conclusion. If we could ask another question, it

Group 1
Does Being an Online Student Affect Your Physical and Social Interaction

would be a paragraph answer and the question would be if the online students notice if their
social and physical life is affected by their online schooling. This question would be difficult to
analyze though because we would have to categorize all of the answers to analyze them. We
would also want to ask why they wanted to take online classes in a paragraph response. If we
could change anything it would be to get more responses and we could do this by sending out the
survey link earlier.