Abstract   Purpose   Background   The Study   Discussion   Conclusion  

Discussion

Weaknesses

There were many different weaknesses that could have affected my study. First, there were two recycling centers of the 33 that I had randomly selected where the telephone lines were disconnected or were no longer in business, so I could not get in contact with them. This discrepancy left me with only 31 recycling centers, or 310 people in my sample. Another conflict that I faced while gathering data, is that I could not personally go to each recycling site and and question ten people myself, so I had to call each center and ask them to question ten people. With this, I had to trust that they were being accurate and cooperative.

Extrapolation

 Since I would not be able to generalize to all people in Cleveland, I would only feel comfortable extrapolating to all recycling facilities in Cleveland. I can extrapolate to other large cities of about the same size and condition of Cleveland. The only people that were asked were people currently present at the recycling centers, asked all at the same time of day. I would like to be able to extrapolate to all people of Cleveland to see how we compare to the proportion of all people of Portland who recycle.

Further Study

The former idea would make a great further study, since I found through research that over 50% of people in Portland, Oregon recycle. I could conduct a different significance test to see if the proportion of people in Cleveland that recycle is significantly less than 0.5 by sampling from many different areas in Cleveland to ask people if they recycle at home.