Stress and sleep

MM Post:

Our group is researching emotional support animals and the stigma that may or may not exist towards the owners. Our hypothesis is if someone has an emotional support animal then a stigma may exist towards the owner. We are also researching the benefits associated with the member's mental health that are correlated to owning an emotional support animal. If a patient receives a certified emotional support animal then his or her mental health should improve. This topic interested me because I love animals, especially dogs, and I was curious about other people's viewpoints on owning an emotional support animal. I would like to explore the history and timeline of emotional support animals and compare the evolution of society's opinion towards them. 

 How should we operationalize our ideas? How should be modify our hypothesis? What should our sample be? Should we have a survey directed towards people who own emotional support animals, the general population, or both?

JP POST

In our group I think we've narrowed our hypothesis to making a correlation to making a New Years resolutions and happiness. Some ideas we've come up with are: Are people who make New Years resolutions generally happier, is there a connection to a failed resolution to sadness or depression, is there a correlation between making a resolution and anxiety, and is being anxious a reason some people use to not make them. I think any of these hypotheses would make for a pretty decent study and the study will need to be self-reported since happiness can't be measured without observation.

EO POST

For our group’s research project/paper we are focusing on emotional support animals, stigma/prejudice, and impacts on users. Together we estimated two possible correlations that we may see. The first is that owning an emotional support animal is positively correlated with stigmatized experiences. The second is that owning an emotional support animal is positively correlated with mental health. For our variables, we operationally defined the terms emotional support animal and stigma. An emotional support animal is defined as any animal that is certified to help with mental health or psychological issues such as anxiety, PTSD, stress, and more rather than physical and/or physiological impairments. Stigma is defined as any preconceived thoughts and feelings on a subject (in this case, emotional support animals).

 

Given the resources and possible sample of participants that we can reach we may not be able to address our second correlation (owning an emotional support animal is positively correlated with mental health) because there is no telling how many participants will have an emotional support animal or not.

 

We are eventually going to create a self-report survey to find out about any stigmas people have about emotional support animals. If people who respond to the survey have an emotional support animal then we should also include questions about the experiences they had. The main thing to consider is how can we create quantifiable questions/answers.

 

One possibility is to first ask the individual for their gender, age, and if they had or have an emotional support animal (some ordinal levels of measurement). Then create statements to determine the prevalent stigmas. They can then answer how they feel about these statements with a provided 4-point scale ranging from strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. Five questions could be more in favor of the use of emotional support animals and the other five would not be in favor of emotional support animals. The five in favor questions could be given 3 points for strongly agree, 2 points for agree, 1 point for disagree, and 0 points for strongly disagree. The five not in favor questions could be given 0 points for strongly agree, 1 point for agree, 2 points for disagree, and 3 points for strongly disagree. Then a scale would need to be made to analyze if a person is more in favor of emotional support animals or not in favor of emotional support animals based on the total number of points received. This idea is based on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Price & Jhangiani, 2018, pp. 104-105). I’m not sure that this method of assigning points would work or not but it does give us an interval level of measurement that we can use to assess people’s stigmas about emotional support animals. Let me know what you think of this idea in the response area below…

 

I would appreciate any other suggestions on how to make survey questions that can measure peoples’ stigmas about emotional support animals into something that can be quantified (with numbers) and analyzed.

  

 

 

Reference

Price, P. C., & Jhangiani, R. S. (2018). Research methods in psychology

[eBook edition]. Saylor Foundation. https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/660