Name: Nuramal Hayati (1126844)Subject: Undergraduate Research ProjectSupervisor: Dr. Sharifah Azizah

The Basic Structure of a Thesis / DissertationThe basic outline of how a thesis should be organised is as follows:

Abstract (< 200 words)1. What’s the issue?

BMI and mental health status.

2. Why is it important?Currently, people who are suffers from morbidity are people who are in the state of overweight and obesity. Overweight and obesity also always being associated with negative mental health status.

3. What did I do?100 IIUM under graduated students will report their BMI and the DASS inventory scale will be answered.

4. For what?Thus, this is as awareness for students to stay healthy and sustain emotional well-being.

5. Who was involved?Local undergraduate student of IIUM from various courses with the range of age of 20 to 26 which are not married yet.

6. What materials were used?Weight-height scale instrument.

7. How did I do it?The participants will be briefed about the research. They also will be informed consent upon being the participants. Then, their data and information will be collected. The data will be processed by using SPSS.

8. What I found?9. What my results meant?10. What my study suggests or can recommend?

Introduction1. Background: What’s the issue?

It is reported that a lot of children having emotional issues such as depression, stress, anxiety and PTSD when it is relates to physical body. The level of well-being among obese/overweight children are decrease compared to children who are in the state of normal weight. What is more astonishing, the level of depress

among children who are in the state of severely obese is same to children who are having cancer (Lee & Yen, 2014).

There was also reported that people who are obesity tend to suicide. The higher potential risk of people who are getting suicide is from man who are obese (Mukamal et al., 2007). This is proved that body weight linked with the emotional welfare.

There is a study in German by Becker et al (2001), stated that they found the connotation between mental disorder and body weight. The study assumed that overall, the highest mental disorders are women who are obese. The subject who were suffers anxiety disorder also frequently from women who were obese rather than not obese.

Therefore, these phenomena shows us that BMI or body weight does give a link and relation upon mental health status among public. Other than mental health status, body weight also have association with physical health such as chronic diseases. Thus, this is why this research is conducted.

2. Statement of the Problem: Why is it important?This topic is important to be reviewed because there are arising cases of morbidity and suffer from chronic illnesses are people who are in the state of obesity. In an additional analysis, people who are obese and not in the ideal state of BMI trajectory, suffers the highest in statistical analysis stated of depression, anxiety and stress. Therefore, this research is an awareness for people to stay healthy and in the state of best BMI to be in a positive well-being.

3. Research Questions: What do I want to know?How does BMI can be related to mental health status?

4. Justification of Research: Why do I want to know?i. This research is needed because there is still lack of non-clinical research

which includes university students as its sample.ii. The relationship of BMI and mental health status among Asian people also

not being well examined in the previous research.

5. Research Objectives: What do I want to do here?To investigate the association between BMI and mental health status which includes depress, anxiety and stress among IIUM students.

6. Research Hypotheses: What do I expect?Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that people whose BMI is in the state of overweight and obese may have higher level of depress, anxiety and stress rather than those who are in the average body weight. However, to confirm this hypothesis further research is needed.

7. Research Implications: What can I learn from here?From this research, what can be learnt is the importance of maintaining a good state of BMI in order to sustain a positive mental and physical well-being.

8. What can I do from what I’ve learnt here?The indicator that lead to mental health status such as depress, anxiety and stress may be obesity and overweight. Therefore, researcher will make a public awareness which relates to weight management to sustain fitness among people especially students.

Operational Definitions1. What are the main terms used in this research and what do they mean?

1. BMIBody Mass Index (BMI) or body weight. BMI is a formula to measure the ideal body mass by calculating weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared.

2. Depression: The Depression scale assesses dysphoria, hopelessness, devaluation of life, self-deprecation, lack of interest/involvement, anhedonia, and inertia.

3. Anxiety: The Anxiety scale assesses autonomic arousal, skeletal muscle effects, situational anxiety, and subjective experience of anxious affect.

4. Stress: The Stress scale is sensitive to levels of chronic non-specific arousal. It assesses difficulty relaxing, nervous arousal, and being easily upset/agitated, irritable/over-reactive and impatient.

2. How are these terms measured?DASS Inventory Scale

Literature Review1. What are the previous findings that presuppose your hypotheses?

The relationship of body weight related to mental health status.

2. How do these findings compare with what I am doing?This present study will conduct in Asian. This is a non-clinical community-based research which includes students from International Islamic University Malaysia as participant. Therefore, this present research is going to examine the relationship between BMI and mental health status by using DASS Inventory to scale their emotional well-being.

3. Are there any critical evaluations or comparisons of previous findings?

There are several studies that examine the relationship of body weight and emotional status.

i. Firstly, the research by (Lee & Yen, 2014) examined the relationship the associations between body weight and mental health indicators including depression, social phobia, insomnia, and self-esteem among Taiwanese adolescents. However, in these study they did not find the links between underweight and depression, social phobia, insomnia, or low self-esteem.

ii. Secondly, the research conducted by Becker et al (2001) which the title is “Obesity and mental illness in a representative sample of young women”. There is a lack of studies that examined the association between mental disorders and weight for non-clinical samples.

Method1. Who were the participants?

Student from International Islamic University Malaysia. Local student (Malay). Undergraduate students. Range of age is from 20 to 26 years old. From various Kulliyyah and course. Not married yet and never pregnant before.

# Is the sample to recruit 100 participants to generalise population of IIUM students too small? Is it better we just take student form Kuliyyah of IRKHS only?

2. What was used to carry out study and to measure variables? To measure BMI:

Calculator

To measure weight & height:Weight and height-scale device

To measure mental health status: Part A: Demographic background and Health variablesPart B: DASS Inventory

3. What was the research design given the hypotheses of the study? Quantitative research design. Random sampling. Correlational study. Because want to see the relationship between BMI

and mental health status. Independent variable: BMI

Dependent variable: Mental health status

4. What was the procedure to carry out the study?

1. The study will be divided into two parts: data collection part and data analysis part. Firstly, the researcher should ask permission from the Psychology Laboratory Assistant, Brother Faizul in order to use weight-height instrument to measure the BMI of the participants.

2. Before the data collection period, researcher should determine the potential risk upon this research either it is no risk research, minimal risk research or full review risk research.

3. Before collecting the data, participants will be informed consents the purpose of the research, expected duration and procedures. Participants also will be informed that they have rights to decline to participate and to withdraw from the research once it has started.

4. After that, the researcher will collect the data by measuring participant’s BMI and distributing DASS Inventory to the participants afterwards.

5. After done collecting data, participants will be debriefed. During this stage, the research questions will be addressed and any misconception will be discussed.

6. Participants also will be briefed that their details and information are private and confidential. It will not be exposed and disclosed to the public as it will against the ethics of research.

7. After data collection finished, the researchers will analyse the data by using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS).

Results1. Reiterate objectives and hypotheses2. Report the status of each hypotheses tested

Discussion1. What was the meaning of each result reported?2. How do they compare to previous findings?3. What could have been reasons for how my results turned out?4. What are the implications of the results?5. What were the limitations of the study?6. What could have been done better?7. What can I recommend for future research?8. What can I recommend for future use of my results? 9. How can my results affect relevant aspects of life in the future?

Conclusions1. What I studied?

2. What I found?3. What can be suggested?4. Why is this suggestion important?

References1. Where did I get my ideas from?

The AbstractThe whole idea of the abstract is to advertise your thesis or journal article, if your thesis is published. It is the first thing that the reader reads to decide if they will be interested in your thesis. So you need to make it as outstanding as possible and short enough for the readers to scan through for the information that is needed. Bring out the main issue that led you to carry out your study in the first place. If the reader is interested in the issue, there’s a higher likelihood of him or her reading further into your abstract to find out what you did with the issue, and what you found. Then the reader would want to find out what you gathered from your findings and how it would benefit them knowing your results. Otherwise, there’s no point wasting time reading your thesis. So in summary, the reader wants to know:

What your issue is What you did What you found What your results mean with regards to the issue studied What your results imply

Becker, E. S., Margraf, J., Turke, V., Soder, U., & Neumer, S. (2010). Obesity and Mental Illness in a Representative Sample of Young Women. International Journal of Obesity, 25, 1, S5–S9.

Lee, J. I., & Yen, C. F. (2014). Associations between Body Weight and Depression, Social Phobia, Insomnia, and Self-Esteem among Taiwanese Adolescents. Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences, 30, 625-630.

Mukamal, K. J., Kawachi, I., Miller, M., & Rimm, E. B. (2007). Body Mass Index and Risk of Suicide among Men. Arch Intern Med, 167, 468-475.

Mague, S., Madden, E., Cohen, B., Bertenthal, D., & Neylan, T. (2013). The Relationship between Body Mass Index and Mental Health among Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans. J Gen Intern Med, 28, S563–70.