Telling-Stories-with-Data
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Outline
Music to the Rescue in Times of Stress
How listening to music can help graduate students cope with stress
Graduate programs are a wonderfully rewarding experience, but they also come with high expectations, high work loads, and high amounts of stress. A 2023 study showed that 34.8% of graduate students experience some level of anxiety.^[1] With the pressure student put on themselves to learn all they can, perform well on assignments and assessments, build professional networks, gain internships and eventually a full time job after graduation, it is a suprise to me that anxiety levels are not closer to 50% or 60%. The honest truth: being a graduate student is hard.
Prior to starting my graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon, I had a career as a public school music teacher (which is a whole different kind of hard). I know from my experience as a music teacher, and musician myself, that music has all sorts of benefits. Music can be used to help relax, pass the time, as a hobby, distraction, a way to reduce stress, help focus, influence or lift our moods, and also to relate to our social groups.^[2] The field of research has been developing and exploring how music can affect our bodies and emotions, including dopamine and cortisol levels and short term memory.^[3] Newer professions like Music Therapy have emerged to help harness the power of music to “manage stress, alleviate pain, express feelings, enhance memory,”^[4] and more. A 2013 study concluded that “the transformative power of music is due to its ability to influence the brain, promoting neuroplasticity, and bringing about changes that can benefit health and wellbeing.”^[5]
Speaking from personal experience, music has certainly helped me to regulate stress and anxiety, slow my heart rate, and improve my mood.
I am interested in exploring the effect of listening to music on the stress levels of graduate students- two major aspects of my life. I will consult my colleagues and gather data on their mental status/stress/anxiety before listening to music and after listening to music.
I am also interested in exploring that though different types of music have different effects on our mood, in terms of reducing overall stress levels in the moment, it doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of music you listen to, as long as you enjoy it.
Rough strucutre
1) Graduate school as a major stressor- immediate audience connection
2) Music’s super power to affect our mood, reduce stress and anxiety, and overall health
3) Data viz on collected data
- Current stress levels
- Hours listening to music
- Mood before listening to favorite song
- Mood after listening to favorite song
4) Call to action: Next time you are feeling stressed, a good coping technique is to pop out your airpods and listen to your favorite song.
Initial sketches
Graduate student stress sketches ^[1]
Music research/statistics sketches ^[2]
Anticipated results of primary data collection sketches
*3.66 hours ^[2]
The data
| Name | URL | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Global prevalence and trend of anxiety among graduate students: A systematic review and meta-analysis | (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/brb3.2909) | Article and study that examines the global stress levels of students in graduate programs |
| Why do we listen to music? A uses and gratifications analysis | (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1348/000712610X506831?saml_referrer=) | Article and study that examines reasons people- specifically adolescents- listen to music |
| The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response | (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3734071/) | Article and study that examines how listening to music effects the body and stress response |
| Music & Mental Health Survey Results | (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/catherinerasgaitis/mxmh-survey-results) | Kaggle dataset with survey responses on what kind of music people listen to, music listening habits, and to what level music helped mental health conditions |
| Music’s effect on graduate student stress | (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKRHoswyXb2Bg1_-wIAPDFeW4is6psYGBFho48rwhR1luPQg/viewform) | A google survey that I created to engage with my collegaues about their stress levels as graduate students, as well as a small experiment on stress levels before and after listening to a song of their choosing |
I have several sources of data that I plan to pull from. The first three sources in the table are articles and studies that I will refer to for basic statistics of the findings. These stastics add credibility to my story and will help to convince my audience that this is a situation worth paying attention to, and could ultimately benefit them.
The fourth source is a kaggle dataset with survey results about the music listening and engagement habits of participants, as well as their mental health. I want to use this dataset to reinforce the concept that though there are studies on the beneficial effects of specific genres of music, ie classical music, listening to music you enjoy can also be a basic tool to help reduce stress levels.
My last source of data is data that I personally collected from my collegaues. The survey I created included both open ended and multiple choice questions and gathered information on my grad school colleagues’ overall stress levels, the average number of hours they listen to music on a typical day, their main motivation for listening to music, and their stress levels before and after listening to music. This is the main source of data I will use in my presentation and data visualizations.
Method and medium
I have almost finished collecting data from the google survey I created and sent out to my collegaues. I will export the responses into a google form, which I will download as an excel file and upload into Tableau to create data visualizations of the results.
I do plan on using Shorthand as my main deliverable for this story. I will embed data vizulations I make in Tableau into Shorthand so that they are interactive.
Sources and Citations
[1] Chi, T., Cheng, L., & Zhang, Z. “Global prevalence and trend of anxiety among graduate students: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” Brain and Behavior, 13, No.4 e2909. (2023) (https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.2909)
[2] Lonsdale, A.J. and North, A.C. “Why do we listen to music? A uses and gratifications analysis.” British Journal of Psychology, 102: 108-134. (2011). (https://doi.org/10.1348/000712610X506831)
[3] Thoma, M. V., La Marca, R., Brönnimann, R., Finkel, L., Ehlert, U., & Nater, U. M. “The effect of music on the human stress response.” PloS one, 8(8), e70156. (2013) (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070156)
[4] American Music Therapy Association. “What is Music Therapy?” About. 2005. (https://www.musictherapy.org/about/musictherapy/)
[5] T Zaatar, M., Alhakim, K., Enayeh, M., & Tamer, R. “The transformative power of music: Insights into neuroplasticity, health, and disease.” Brain, Behavior, & Immunity - Health, 35, 100716. (2023). (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbih.2023.100716)