Week 14 — Sleep, Stress, and Coping: Reading the Evidence Carefully — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 13 of the term — count what a small sleep dataset shows, sort a set of coping moves, explain what each result does and does not say, and help a cousin read a health headline.

This week you learned that stress starts with how you appraise an event, that the body answers in seconds with fight-or-flight and over months with the general adaptation syndrome, and that people cope by changing the stressor or by managing their feelings. In Week 2 you learned that a correlational study supports "associated with" and nothing stronger; this assignment applies that habit to stress and health advice. You work two short problems, interpret each one, and explain a health headline to someone who has never studied psychology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Analysis Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Two results this week are easy to state and easy to overread. The first comes from the course's illustrative sleep and quiz-score dataset, constructed for this course and not real data: ten students' hours of sleep the night before a 20-point quiz were 5, 6, 6.5, 7, 7, 7.5, 8, 8, 8.5, and 9, and the correlation between sleep and score is r = 0.8457. Most adults need about 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night. The second comes from the dead-laptop scene: a student whose laptop dies the night before a paper is due borrows a library laptop, emails her instructor, takes a ten-minute walk, and calls a friend to vent.

Work these two problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. In the illustrative sleep dataset of 10 students, 3 students slept fewer than 7 hours. How many of the students slept 7 to 9 hours?
2. In the dead-laptop scene, a student makes 2 problem-focused coping moves (borrowing a library laptop and emailing her instructor) and 2 emotion-focused coping moves (a ten-minute walk and a call to a friend). How many coping moves does she make in all?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation and one limit. For problem 1, explain what the guideline of about 7 to 9 hours means here, what r = 0.8457 says about sleep and score in this sample, why stress is a third variable that could explain the pattern, and why the design supports an association claim and not a causal claim. For problem 2, explain which two moves change the stressor and which two manage the feelings, why the walk is not problem-focused coping even though it helped, and when each style tends to fit better.

Explain it to a non-expert

A cousin who has never studied psychology saw a post that said "sleep more and your grades go up" and is planning to quit a part-time job to sleep longer before exams. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, what data like the course's sleep dataset can show, why stress could be behind both less sleep and lower scores, and one limit of that kind of evidence. Explain any technical term in everyday words, and do not diagnose your cousin or give medical advice.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who read that "people who own dogs live longer" and plans to adopt three dogs to stay healthy. Model answer: "That finding comes from comparing people who already own dogs with people who don't, so it shows the two things go together, not that the dogs cause the longer life. People who are healthy and active to begin with may be more likely to own dogs, and that could explain the link. A dog might still be good for you, but this kind of study can't tell you how much, so I'd adopt for the love of dogs, not as a health plan."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own explanation and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single brief containing:

• the two answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation and one limit;
• your message to your cousin, explaining in everyday words what data like the sleep dataset can show, why stress could be behind both less sleep and lower scores, and one limit of that kind of evidence; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your brief as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the coping sort with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

If stress ever feels like more than you can carry, your campus counseling or health center, or a health professional you trust, is a good place to start.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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