research question

What are the reasons of stimulant misuse according to the top 10 most circulated US newspapers?

CHICAGO TRIBUNE 22 N.Y. POST 10 NEWSDAY 2 THE NEW YORK TIMES 47 W. STREET JOURNAL 4 JOURNAL NAME NUMBER OF ARTICLES WASHINGTON POST 13 USA TODAY 21 THE LOS ANGELES TIMES 12 DAILY NEWS 14 CAUSE ARTICLES NUMBER OF ARTICLES - 201CAUSES STRICTLY RELATED TO COLLEGE HABITS NUMBER OF ARTICLES - 85CAUSES NOT RELATED TO STUDY AT ALL HOVER HERE PERFORMANCE STAY FOCUS ADDICTION PRESSURE SELLING STRESS SOCIALIZATION COMPETITION WORKLOAD GET HIGH LAZINESS 10 5 4 4 22 3 7 8 63 5 5 1 4 22 1 4 5 8 55 5 7 1 1 3 10 7 34 3 1 1 1 14 2 2 2 26 1 4 4 1 12 2 1 25 3 2 3 2 7 1 2 3 23 2 2 1 8 1 2 4 20 3 2 2 3 5 1 4 20 2 1 3 1 1 4 12 1 1 1 3 6 2 2
Description Protocol Data

Description

On the base of the Protocol 3 a new question appeared. What is the perception of the publishers? In this treemap representation every cluster correspond to one of the newspaper selected. Within the clusters are highlighted the causes that lead a student to take brain enhancers. In orange are displayed the main reasons strictly related to college habits, instead of the grey ones that are not associated to studies topics. In this way a total view on the reasons for the misuse of stimulants among students is displayed. The causes that stand out mostly are “performance”, “focus” and “pressure”, according to the newspapers. By hovering on each button it will be highlighted the cause mentioned by each newspaper in its cluster.

In order to understand the causes that lead a student to use a brain enhancer like Adderall, an amount of 11 categories were created to classify the topics given in each article. The categories selected include stress, lazy, competition, selling, workload, focus, socialize, pressure, addiction, performance and get high. All of the 146 articles selected that were talking about Adderall and students were checked and analyzed one by one for a better classification. By using the built spreadsheet in Rawgraph a first draft treemap was created and then refined in Adobe Illustrator for the final displaying.

Protocol

example of protocol

Data

Data Source: Articles from the following Newspapers
Timestamp: Jan 2012-Nov 2018
View Data (500Kb)

Creating a “vocabulary” of words (referred to the most common causes found in the first phase of the project), all the articles of the previous protocol were read to understand to which reasons they are referring talking about adderall in academic world. The spreadsheet contains all the articles related to students and for every one of these shows the reasons to which the authors referred. Other two sheets show the amount of causes and articles for each newspaper.