ineke.co.uk

A friend of mine put up a theory that because she’s vegetarian, and therefore has “greater respect for animals”, she doesn’t get bitten by insects. It seemed an interesting idea so I decided to test it!
She jokingly requested a report, and so I found an old template for GCSE Science write-ups and below is what we found out!

Aim
To determine whether a person’s choice to eat meat has any effect as to how much they may get bitten by insects.

Factors which will affect the results
We won’t have quantitative data to analyse as a person is not generally aware of precisely how frequently they are bitten, so this data collection will need to be qualitative.

Preliminary Work
We asked two or three people around the office to see if this is the sort of study that could be run. All subjects asked were able to give an answer, and interestingly all support our hypothesis.

Prediction
I don’t think we will see a strong correlation, but hope to see a positive one to some degree.

Method
A survey will be conducted over Facebook and Twitter to ask people to answer two simple questions:
1) Do you tend to get bitten by insects or not?
2) Are you vegetarian?

Measurements/Variables
Results will simply be tallied from both social networks. There is a chance some people could be vague about their answer to question one, so some of those may need to be considered for validity.
We may get answers from pescatarians; these would need to be treated as a third group.

Equipment
Facebook
Twitter
Computer
Internet Connection

Diagrams

Tables of Results

Conclusion
Other than the obvious conclusion that I know an awful lot more meat eaters than I do vegetarians (or at least, ones that will respond to surveys), there is a clear difference in results between vegetarians and omnivores.
80% of vegetarians surveyed do not tend to get bitten by insects, whereas for meat-eaters this was only 45.1%
Obviously it would be advantageous to have a larger sample data size, particularly of vegetarians, but the results I have obtained clearly support the hypothesis.

Graphs

Evaluating Evidence

One person was a bit unclear in their answer and said “not often” in response to the first question, which I treated as a no, but could easily have been a yes. If more people had responded like this I would probably have split them across the categories. Fortunately it was only the one.

For a future extension to this project I know some people who have had phases of their lives in which they have been vegetarians and phases where they have not. It would be interesting to hear anecdotal evidence as to whether this change in diet had an effect on them being bitten by insects.s

It would also be interesting to see what other dietary options had an effect on being bitten. For example, one test subject asked if a high intake of sugar would affect the likelihood. This would be particularly interesting given the current fashion of cutting sugar out of diets.