Honors students Emily Ye, Caroline, Schluterman, and Paige Norris handing out surveys in the honors college

Author: Paige Norris | Major: Biology | Semester: Fall 2024

As a biology major who is interested in health care and research, I had the opportunity this past spring semester to take an honors research course on Arkansas Health and Wellness. I worked with four of my fellow honors students and our mentor, Dr. Jennie Popp, creating a survey. I am planning to continue doing more research in the future.

We created a survey to better understand University of Arkansas students’ knowledge and perceptions of reproductive and maternal health. This research project will directly help the students on our campus. With the responses from our survey, we will be able to see where the knowledge gaps are and hopefully find a way to close the gaps. This research could be very helpful when figuring out the curriculum of sex-ed courses to better focus on these topics. We also found that there is little research done on college students’ knowledge of maternal health, so this research will hopefully lead to further research in the future.

One of the first things we learned in our lecture was that Arkansas is currently ranked at the very bottom for women’s health and reproductive care. That statistic really stuck with us, and we wanted to see how we could hopefully improve that. We were interested in knowing what college students knew about contraceptives, STIs, and maternal health. College students are young adults who will possibly begin building a family in the years to come if not already. Seeing how much these students know about prenatal and postnatal care will be helpful in possibly seeing where we could improve our education.

In creating our survey questionnaire, we had to be careful with the wording we were using. We wanted to make sure that we were using simple terminology so that students who might not be familiar with medical terms would be able to understand what we were asking. It was also important that there we didn’t ask any leading questions, we just wanted to know what they knew and how they felt about certain topics. Fixing the wording and any spelling errors took us at least two weeks of class, it was very important that the survey was just right.

Once we had our survey questions finalized our lovely mentor, Dr. Popp, was able to put that into Qualtrics for us to collect responses. We started distributing our survey online by sending it to friends and posting it into groups. Then we made flyers to hang up and we tabled inside the union to collect more responses. Once we had good sample size, we took all our data and started analyzing.

This summer we are continuing to work on analyzing our data. We are planning to have a draft of a poster by the end of summer. Sometime in the fall semester there will be an Arkansas Health and Wellness Summit where we will present our results and poster. This experience has been amazing, and I am so grateful to be a part of the honors college.