Background Information
Using the Internet tool, Google search engine, I was able to find many previously performed studies that were relevant to my topic of “association between high school students’ height and average hours of sleep”. In order to find studies that pertained to my topic of “Is there an association between the height of a high school student and the amount of sleep he/she gets per night?”, I typed in two different phrases into the Google search bar: “height and hours of sleep” was used to find one of the relating studies and “height and hours of sleep studies” was used to find the remaining two studies.
Anne Andel Community College
The first study that I found by searching “height and hours of sleep”
was performed by an instructor at Anne Anendel Community College in
the year 2011. Instructor Kegan took a survey from a level 121
Statistics course of various different factors including height,
gender, means of transportation utilized to attend classes, whether
the student was living on or off campus, employment status,
rank(sophomore, junior, senior, etc;), average hours of sleep per
night, and birth month. Instructor Kegan, then, used a scatter
plot to summarize the resulting data and decide if there appeared to
be a linear relationship or any visible relationship between the hours
of sleep and height of the statistics students. Instructor Kegan
found that the scatter plot did not show a strong linear relationship
between hours of sleep and height, and also that there was no
distinguishable pattern in the data displayed.
The second study I found, with the keywords “height and hours of sleep
studies”, was a study done by four doctors in 2007: Oskar G. Jenni MD,
Luciano Molinari PhD, Jon A. Caflish MD, and Remo H. Largo MD. The
study was performed in Switzerland. The overall goal of the
study was to describe the variability in sleep duration in healthy
children between the ages of one to ten years old in comparison with
their corresponding growth measures. The object of this study
was children between the ages of one and ten and the sample taken
consisted of 305 children. The 305 children’s sleeping habits and
growth measurements were taken once each year from birth until they
reached the age of ten. The conclusions drawn from the study
suggest that sleep duration during early and middle childhood show
great variability and individual approach is needed in dealing with
and analyzing each child’s development. Through this statistical
study, four doctors were able to better their understanding of
the variation in child development and thus become more knowledgeable
about growth patterns amongst children and how to approach them.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/120/4/e769.full
I found one more study by using the same “heights and hours of sleep
study” keyword phrase; this study was performed in 1990. This
older study was performed by four people from the Department of
Community Science at United Medical School in London. The names
of those who carried out the survey are as follows: Guillford MC,
Price CE, Rona RJ, and Chinn S. This group used a sample of
children who were participating in a National Study of Health and
Growth. A questionnaire filled in by the children’s parents was
used to collect data. The study included 5,145 children who were
all between the ages of five and eleven. After taking
out/eliminating the effects of any extraneous factors known to have an
influence on a children’s growth, there was found to be a very weak
negative association between the sleep duration and height of the
children included in the sample. Therefore, since the
relationship was weak, it was concluded that sleep duration does not
have a significant influence on children’s growth measures.
http://www.statcrunch.com/5.0/viewresult.php?resid=1068000