Design Statement
Data: The topic I chose was the effects of exercise on my mood. To do this, I started an excel sheet once the project was introduced. The first day was September 6th on my excel sheet. I then filled out all the rest of the dates following for the next 10 weeks until I reached November 15th. Every day, at the end of the day, I rated my overall mood of the day on a scale of 1-10. 1 meaning I was in a terrible mood, unhappy, angry, or sad. And then 10 being that I was very happy, excited, motivated, and etc. Then, next to that number for each day, I noted “yes” or “no”. “Yes” meaning I did exercise that day and “no” meaning I did not exercise that day. From this data, I then thought of some questions that I could ask myself based on the results I got. I wondered if exercise could have a noticeable influence on my mood, if it is a good way to cope with depression, whether taking days off makes my mood drop drastically, and if working out for multiple days in a row improves my mood. I answered all of these questions through the next step.
Visualizations: The next step was to make my visualizations with charts. I chose to make a pie chart to represent the total number of days throughout the ten weeks that I did exercise and that I did not exercise so that for my further charts, it would make sense that it was nearly half and half but I did work out 7 more days than I did not work out in the time span, which ultimately, isn’t that much. I also made a bar chart to show what my average mood was for the days that I did exercise compared to the days that I did not exercise. For the pie chart and bar chart, I used red to represent “did exercise” and green for “no exercise” to keep in in sync. I then made a column chart to compare the amount of days I exercised in a given week compared to me average mood of that week. This chart was to answer my question about the consistency of working out vs. not working out and how that can affect my mood per week. The column chart was labeled with each week in the ten week span and the red represents the amount of days I exercised in that specific week and the light blue represents my average measure of mood for that week.
Insights: As I made these charts, my questions I asked previously had been answered clearly. The pie chart basically just showed me that I live a pretty balanced life when it comes to working out. Although I worked out more days than not, it was still a close call. This made it easier to compare my data between the two variables however. With my bar chart, I had about double the better mood from the averages based off the days that I exercised compared to the average of the days where I did not exercise. This answered my question that exercise truly does improve my mood because it actually doubles it compared to a day without it. The column chart showed me that the correlation between working out consecutively and more days in a week, overall gives me a better week because the mood average was higher whenever the number of times I worked out in a week was higher. I was not really surprised by my results. I have done a lot of research in the past few years about ways to cope with depression and improve happiness and exercise has always been one of the main items on the list. I personally feel better when I exercise and this project proved that to me. This inspires me to continue to exercise as often as possible in order to live a better life.