Thanks to the Robert J. Kolenkow and Robert A. Reitz Endowed Fund for Student Scientific Research, Matt Murashige ’27 gained research experience in one of his main areas of interest, the psychology of aging, by working with the University of Hawai’i’s Department of Psychiatry.
One of the department’s research projects focuses on informal caregivers to the elderly, usually the adult children of aging parents who provide unpaid care to their family members. Within this project, Matt analyzed informal caregivers’ reports of the psychological burden they experienced. “In trying to help informal caregivers, I realized that the assessment of the burden that they feel when caregiving for their parents is an important measurement that isn’t emphasized enough currently, and so I looked into how we can better measure the burden that these caregivers feel,” he said. He concentrated on a 10-item survey that judges the subjective experience of burden. The data analysis had previously focused on the composite score, but Matt decided to analyze each component of the score separately. “I thought that maybe we could find some interesting data if, instead of only looking at the composite score, we looked at the individual questions as well,” he said.
Matt had little experience with reading research papers, and he says that one of his biggest areas of growth this summer was learning how to navigate and use academic literature. He also developed skills in statistics through a bioinformatics course that he was able to take at the University of Hawai’i, which focused on using R to run statistical tests for biology experiments. He says that in addition to gaining experience with analyzing data, learning these statistical concepts has made it easier for him to understand research papers. “Getting to see the statistical rigor that’s required in order to even understand this academic literature in general was very eye-opening,” he said.
Matt says that he enjoyed learning about the psychology of aging and that he hopes to continue on in this field, perhaps double majoring in biology and psychology. “My big-picture goal,” he said, “would be to enrich this field of healthy aging as a whole.”