Cookies Make The Testing Go Right – Sabrina Lomeli

After what seemed like for ever, I’m happy to announce that M&S Research is finally able to start conducting our patient research to test our theory of stress in adolescent girls at the Ann Richards School. After researching the correlation between heart rate and blood pressure and how they correspond to stress and vice verse, we had created a form that was our proposal to do testing on students in order to test our theory of stress and blood pressure.

Now this might not seem that bad to some of you, though it’s a very difficult task to complete, due to so many little safety and patient confidentiality things, the task was made more difficult  to say the least. As far as I used to be concerned, I never really thought of tester to participant interactions to be so complicated. Though as I learned, it involves a lot of anti-corrosion methods and having to give step by step instructions to how the test is going to be conducted. Also needing to give them some type of incentive on how this study may benefit them as well.

To this, it was a little difficult to give people some type of incentive because we could not promise that by answering a few questions and by allowing us to take your blood pressure you will some how receive some added benefits like a reduction of acne or to become smarter. Though some discomforts was easy to do considering that using the blood pressure machine causes slight fatigue in the hand and a short term experienced numbness.

Though lucky for us even with the non-existent benefits and the obvious, but short term, negatives, the wonderful girls in our class were still very willing to help us in our experimenter. In fact, today we went through our first round of data collection with our participants and all were very cooperative and were very grateful for the cookies we gave as a small token of our thanks to them. Hopefully as we continue to take blood pressure we will seem some type of correlation between the stress they feel and their blood pressure that we read. Though even if our theory is to be proven false, there is still a chance that this may help us to try to find another factor to test in the future.