Weakness
Our study has a few issues that we knew
that we couldn’t avoid. We switched one weakness for another one in
this study though by deciding to weigh people instead of doing
surveys. This created a nonresponse bias that we couldn’t control.
Since we didn’t want to and really couldn’t force anyone to step on
the scale, we had some nonresponse bias. Most of the nonresponse
bias came from bigger people. For girls, what is considered “big” is
much smaller than that which is considered “big” for guys.
Therefore, we had a nonresponse bias mainly from girls. Since the
nonresponse bias was consistent for both the winter sports and fall
sports athletes, both the data sets are actually skewed more to the
right then what is displayed by the curve. Another nonresponse bias
occurred closer to the end of the day. After lunch, everyone is full
and even a little bit cranky; it is much harder to weigh people
closer to the end of the day. The weakness that we switched for was
a nonresponse bias in bigger people stepping on a scale as compared
to a response bias that resulted in a lie that would happen in a
survey. A funny thing that happened was some people announced their
weight before stepping on the scale. Almost 100% of the time that
someone announced their weight, they were off by at least 5 pounds.
I can recall somebody being off by at least 20 pounds as well.
Therefore, we are confident that our choice of weighing people
provided us much more accurate results. We would have had
nonresponse bias either way from the surveys because some people
just don’t want to do it. We would have even had a greater
nonresponse bias from the surveys because most people wouldn’t
understand the purpose of the study and would be offended. I am
honestly confident that we would have had trouble getting even 30
people in each sample from a survey. Therefore, we have nonresponse
bias in our study; however we limited this by physically weighing
people as opposed to taking surveys.
Extrapolation
Extrapolation for these results to other high schools is somewhat questionable. This study showed us that there isn’t much of a difference between the weights of NOHS fall and winter varsity sport athletes as according to the means and medians from both the samples. However, we feel as though this data cannot be extrapolated because different schools have different athletic programs. Some schools might have a killer football team with many students having the weights of professional football players while having a mediocre basketball team with kids that don’t weigh too much. North Olmsted high school, when it comes to varsity sports is mediocre. Due to North Olmsted’s limited success in any sport, the weights of the two groups are very similar. This just shows that at North Olmsted, anyone can participate in sports. At other schools, it may be much harder and even maybe much easier to make varsity. Therefore, the weights of these athletes will fluctuate with the sports that the schools excel in. We believe that this data cannot be extrapolated safely to any school unless the school has similar athletic success in sports to North Olmsted. The reason it is based on athletic success is because on the better teams, in most sports, the student athletes weigh more because they have weights which are similiar to the athletes in their professional sport, which is normally larger (with the only difference being cross country, swimming, and wrestling).
Suggestions
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A study building upon the study of our work could be modified to find the average weight of varsity fall athletes versus varsity winter athletes from all over the United States. This new study could only truly work if we included several different schools in our sample from all over the United States. The school choice and athlete choice would be completely random, however stratified, just like this study was stratified. This study would hopefully take into account schools of different athletic success and therefore give us a good understanding of the difference between the average weight of varsity fall and winter sports athletes in the United States.