How Gender Affected Eating Habits Among College Students

The United States is the most obese country in the world. Having bad eating habits destroys living a healthy life. Since eating is a big part of our everyday life, I felt that I should look more into this topic. My broader research question was, how does gender effects eating habits in college students? The reason why I asked this question was because being a college athlete, I always wondered what students who didn’t play sports were eating and whether they were eating good or bad. This is a question that somehow always came up when I was thinking about a college student life without playing sports. Not only that, but I wanted to know what social influences impacted a student’s eating habits. In America eating healthy has become a key
answered. I decided to use observation and in-depth interviews. For my research I would go to 3 urban universities and 3 non-urban universities. My access point within the universities would be the dining halls or restaurants on campus or off campus. This should be easy to access because I am a college student and I would fit it in perfect. I would spend 3 weeks at each university doing my observation and in depth interviews. While at each school I would observe 50 males and 50 females at each university. It would be using random sampling because I would just choose any male or female I wanted to observe. I would have informed consent from each student to ask them questions. While doing this research I would be overt meaning I would not be a participate in the study. Not being a participate would help me not be bias and judge those who are being observe and interviewed. The reason why I will observe first is I would not need consent to observe because if I tell the student I am observing them first this would mess up my response rate because a student would choose a different selection of food if they know I am watching them. While doing my research I will observe what females are eating and observe what males are eating. The reason I will observe both gender is because in society there are social influences on why people eat
Not only are there more food places to eat but schools in urban areas have grocery stores and usually have food trucks all over there city streets to provide more food for students to eat. Being a student at Wake Forest I would have more information than other schools because I already know the meal plans offered at Wake Forest and know I would already know how many food services are accessible to students. A small school like Wake Forest would have smaller bias if any bias at all and low external validity, because it is private not as big as a university like Temple. A school like Temple would have high external validity, because it is more generalizable. In my research it may be hard for me to do observations at urban schools who are off campus because I may think I am observing a student but in reality I may not be observing a student but a person who is not attending the university. Since I will only be observing 50 males and 50 females at each university my sample size can