Discussion

Flaws and Weaknesses in our study.

Weaknesses and ways to fix them

There are a few weaknesses in our study. One such flaw when conducting our study was that we should have used a larger sample size. Increasing it to 200 might have made a more significant difference between the two different flavors, chocolate and vanilla. This change may have also allowed us to survey more boys given that our original study had fewer boys than girls. Since our study mainly focused on students at North Olmsted High School, we could extend our study to other high school students and/or people to yield a greater range of data. Large random samples of high school students across the country may have shown more accurate results. Furthermore, since we conducted a study, there obviously is non-response biases involved due to the fact that five students did not return the surveys that we sent out. Another flaw in our study was under coverage due to the fact that several full time Polaris students could not receive the survey. We could try to find some way to get surveys out to full time Polaris students. Perhaps we could contact the Polaris students through email or possibly their teachers at Polaris. Some extraneous factors were also incorporated in our study. For example, some students that we surveyed may not have liked either flavor or had been allergic to ice cream so they’ve never tasted ice cream and therefore could not fill out the survey truthfully or accurately. To correct this we could include a question asking whether the students like ice cream or not. Also, some students may not have taken the survey seriously. These weaknesses in our study may have had an impact on our results and skewed them. 

Extrapolating

Despite some of the flaws and imperfections contained in our study, we can say that our data results can be extrapolated to high school students in North Olmsted. However, it may be dangerous to extrapolate our results to other high school students across the country and even to younger children, because our data results only pertain to the students at North Olmsted High School. Other high school students from different areas of the country may have different tastes and preferences from those in North Olmsted. As for younger children, their ice cream preferences may also differ due to differences in age.