1 Overview
Within my advisor, I co-designed and implemented a mixed-methods study that starts from a deceptively simple question—how do students from different cultural backgrounds actually relieve stress in their day-to-day lives—and pushes past stereotypes using both survey data and open-ended narratives. I helped build and iterate the survey instrument, piloting it with early participants and refining wording and scales whenever items produced ambiguous or contradictory patterns in ANOVA and regression models, working with co-authors and my advisor until we could separate culture, gender, and convenience effects in a defensible way.
On the qualitative side, I developed a lightweight analysis pipeline that combines hand coding with LDA-style topic modeling and SBERT-based similarity analysis, treating disagreements between algorithms and human readings as signals to revisit our categories rather than letting any single method act as ground truth. The final picture shows that while students raised in East Asian contexts do lean more toward structured introspection and those from Western backgrounds report more social and leisure activities, many weave together cross-cultural practices whenever schedules, spaces, or peers make them viable—an insight that now shapes how I think about designing stress interventions that respect cultural histories without freezing people inside them.
2 Selected visuals
