Further Work

Our study may have been much too broad a topic to cover on our first attempt. The topic of health conscientiousness is really just an opinion survey. Several surveys that ask for hours of sleep, daily calorie intake, daily amount of exercise, and amount of substance abuse would provide better information concerning the student body’s health. These surveys would offer much more useful information about the actual health of North Olmsted students instead of just an opinion of it. Future statistics classes should consider these as legitimate and interesting surveys to conduct.

Weaknesses

The wording of our question may have been misleading for some of the students being surveyed. The test was not meant to analyze how healthy the students actually were, but how healthy they thought they were. If we had surveyed how healthy students actually are, there would have been a standardized system to check students’ health against a constant. More ambiguity was introduced to the survey by subjecting all the students who participated to their own standards. A list of healthy habits for teenagers of both genders was listed at the bottom of every survey to give students a starting point to more accurately judge their health conscientiousness. This list of constants was supposed to standardize the students’ thinking about their health. The list of healthy habits was very small text at the bottom that students may not have read if they were attempting to quickly answer the survey and get on with their daily routines. An alternative method of surveying would have been to ask many questions, such as, how many hours of sleep do you get a night?, how much exercise do you get a day?, and how many calories do you consume a day? This method would force every student to consider many aspects about their health and may have better engaged them to think about how health aware they are. Another weakness was non-response bias; if 100% of our randomly selected students had responded, Our results would have been more accurate, and our conclusion may have been different. Plus, there may have been a possibility that students may have lied on their surveys, and there would be no way to know about it. A confounding variable lies in the ambiguity of personal standards. One student may have considered many aspects of good health, and then made their judgment, while another student may have only considered their diet. Personal standards and availability of healthy options may all be affected by several confounding variables. Race, socioeconomic levels, geographic location, and culture could all affect a person’s ability and willingness to practice certain habits deemed healthy.

Extrapolate

We have limited populations to impose our findings on to. Considering race, socioeconomic levels, geographic location, and culture as aspects that affect a person’s health conscientiousness, our conclusions can only be extrapolated to populations that have similar characteristics as North Olmsted high school. The random list of students we surveyed provided the race of the students. We sent out a total of 142 surveys. Of the 142 surveyed, only 3 were listed as African-American, only 3 were listed as Hispanic, only 3 were listed as Asian, and only 1 was listed as multiracial. That means that of the 142 surveyed, 132 students were classified as White. Clearly, race must be considered as a confounding variable; therefore our conclusions should not be extrapolated to a population that has a significantly different race distribution. Of our sample, 93% surveyed were White. Also, socioeconomic factors would affect our surveys results. Without doing any research it is impossible to generalize the North Olmsted High School population accurately. Although, for the sake of the hypothetical, we would assume most students surveyed belong to a middle income household. Socioeconomic levels are significant because they greatly affect if a family can consistently afford healthy food and whether the family knows what it means to be healthy. Geographic location is significant because certain areas of the country have much different diets than others. For example, a student diet in West Virginia would be much different than in San Francisco. North Olmsted is a suburb of a Mid-Western city, so any population we extrapolate onto, should also be a suburb of a Mid-Western city. Culture is very closely linked to geographic location. Certain areas of the county have taken much more proactive steps towards bettering teen health. For example, New York City was the first area to ban Trans fats and post calorie counts on fast food menus. North Olmsted has taken moderate steps in their school lunch program to eliminate unhealthy food options. North Olmsted schools no longer fry any food; other schools in the nation still do prepare food by frying it. In conclusion, our study’s findings should only safely be extrapolated to a population of high school students who are predominantly white, middle income, and live in a Mid-Western suburban city. Also, our sample size was never large enough to run a fully accurate chi-squared test, so our conclusions may not even be accurate enough to extrapolate at all.