Spring 2012 Edition
Cafeteria Clutter By Laith Kalai If you noticed that last week there were three intimidating and hungry seniors taking notes as you ate your lunch innocently (or not) in the cafeteria, we (Carli, Ioanna and Laith) would like to inform you that it was all for a good cause. Contrary to popular belief, ACS HS students do not litter as much as they have been assumed to do. Or at least this was not the case during the month of February. Questioning the validity of recent thought within the ACS HS community, three IB Psychology students decided to use the knowledge acquired from an in-class qualitative/quantitative research project and apply it to the real world—the ACS environment they live in. Carli Venter, Ioanna Tzigou and Laith Kalai (Class of 2012), conducted a covert observational research study to see to what extent does the ACS community litters during lunch time. At first, being concerned with the amount of garbage left behind, we deemed a quantitative approach was necessary to quantify the amount of garbage ACS HS students leave behind. Something still seemed missing, however. Not satisfied with a simple statistical approach, we decided to tackle the issue using a secondary approach that is concerned with the why and how aspect of the equation, aiming to see why ACS students tend to leave their garbage behind. During every lunch break for one entire week, we divided the ACS cafeteria into three sections, each of us responsible for one section and that held five lunch tables;
approximately five students per table. Students were observed for 30 minutes and their garbage disposal patterns were recorded anonymously. Once students decided to leave the cafeteria and their garbage behind, they were approached by one of us for a short interview that consisted of the following questionnaire: 1.Are you responsible for any chores at home? including but not limited to: cleaning up after yourself or other family members, doing the dishes, taking out the trash, other chores.
Yes No
2.Why do you tend to leave your garbage behind? a.) You assume someone else will clean up after you. (friend, janitor, someone else) b.) You don’t necessarily care. c.) You forget
Out of a high school student population of approximately 350 students, 155 were observed and questioned. Note: The study conducted only covers students who ate their lunch in the cafeteria during the specific week. To our surprise, an impressive 15% litter rate took place during that specific week. Out of 155 hungry students, only 24 left their garbage behind (garbage includes containers, bottles and/or utensils). As you can note on the graph on the next page, the biggest three sections are concerned with the quantitative approach while the smaller two sections are concerned with the qualitative measure. However, just as most qualitative research studies end up, the qualitative approach ends up being quantified as well.