Officially a Graduate!

Hey there, 

So last week I graduated! Can't quite believe University is over, but it was such a great experience. 

I ended up doing my dissertation on the effect of Instagram as a platform for a health intervention, looking at how it could change the knowledge of the link between diet and cancer, in 18-30 year olds. It was a tough project as there wasn't loads of previous studies that were similar so I had to role with it! 
I used a public survey with true and false statements (similar to the Cancer Awareness Measure) by which people had to rate the certainty of their answer, as an indication of how confident they were of their response. I had different dietary sections to the survey including Alcohol; Fibre, fruit, vegetables and processed food; Red and processed meat; and Food preparation and salt. The responses to the first survey were interesting and generally positive, however it was also interesting to see some people commented some doubts about my statements. For example, there was denial over the fact 'there is no lower limit of alcohol consumption that does not increase your risk of cancer'. It was so interesting to see these comments because it just shows how unaware and how little knowledge people have regarding diet and cancer risk. 
The Instagram intervention involved posting every other day for 3 weeks with images relating the statements I was testing knowledge on. It was great to see that after stats analysis there was a significant improvement of knowledge after the intervention compared to before! This also shows the great affect Instagram can have with improving health knowledge, and it is frustrating that it is not used for more health related issues! 
Anyway I was very happy with my result (got a high 2:1) and made me realise it would be great to work in public health nutrition in the future. 

:) 

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