Research question
Are people who take coffee before going to bed likely to have difficulty falling asleep?
Experimental hypothesis
Consumption of coffee before going to bed will cause individuals to have difficulty falling asleep
Independent variable
The amount of coffee the subjects drink before going to bed
Dependent variable
The time after going to bed that subjects fall asleep.
Participants
Ten people will be selected for this experiment. From the group, five will drink coffee before going to bed while the other five will not. The latter group will be the control for the experiment.
Measures
The candidates selected for the experiment will be people who typically go to bed at the same time. This will help rule out the effect of other habitual factors that might influence the outcome of the experiment.
The experiment
For this experiment, questionnaires will be sent out to a class of college students, who will be required to fill in the time they usually go to bed and how easy it usually is for them to fall asleep.
From the feedback, 10 subjects will be selected for the experiment. The selected candidates should be those who go to bed at around the same time and have no difficulty in falling asleep. Before beginning the experiment, the subjects will be required to sign a form indicating that they are not under any medication whose interaction with a coffee can have adverse effects. They also need to confirm that drinking coffee does not have any known affect on their health.
Once the forms have been signed, the candidates will be briefed on the process of the experiment. The test subjects will be required to take similar amounts of coffee immediately before going to bed. The control group will not take any coffee before going to bed. A passive observer will be selected for each subject, and he/she will be tasked with the responsibility of recording the time when the subject fell asleep. Alternatively, the subjects can be provided with video cameras, which they switch on before going to bed.
After taking coffee, the test subjects will be required to immediately go to bed. The observers will be given forms to record the time when the subjects went to bed and when they fell asleep. If cameras are used, data analysts will collect the recordings the following day and record the timings from them. The experiment will be conducted for 10 consecutive days.
The timings collected in the 10 days will be evaluated, and an average of sleeping time (number of minutes between going to bed and falling asleep) for each individual calculated.
Results and conclusion
It is expected that the subjects who drank coffee before going to bed will take more time before falling asleep, compared to those who did not. If this is the case, then the experiment hypothesis will have been confirmed, and the answer to the research question will be changed to the following statement: “People who take coffee before going to bed are likely to have difficulty falling asleep.”
On the other hand, if there is no marked disparity between times that subjects from the two groups fall asleep, then the experimental hypothesis will be disapproved, and the research question will be changed to the following statement: “People who take coffee before going to bed are not likely to have difficulty falling asleep.”