Statement of the Problem

The purpose of this project is to observe whether there is any change in health conscientiousness that may be attributed to an increase in age. Personally, I have noticed an increased awareness towards proper nutrition and exercise as I have matured in the last 3 years. My peers seem to fall into three very broad categories that involve how concerned they are about their physical well beings. Some peers have a complete disregard for what they consume and the habits they indulge in. These individuals who are apathetic towards their health may eat food containing unsafe levels of fat and sodium regularly, engage in substance abuse ranging from tobacco to alcohol, and think little of participating in regular exercise. I would assume that most people who attend our high school, as well as many high schools, have a health conscientiousness that involves them being concerned about what they eat and what they do, but do not let it deter them too much from having fun and convenience in their lifestyles. Finally, there is a select group of teenagers that adhere to a strict diet and exercise regime. We hypothesize that older teenagers, members of the junior and senior class, are more concerned about the health decisions they make. The tests is meant to see if an association between grade level and health awareness indicates that as students progress through high school, in general, they are more aware of their health.

Designing the experiment

We hypothesized that as students progressed through their high school career they would become more health conscious about their lifestyles. We proceeded to plan an experiment that could be used to find an association between class and health conscientiousness. We designed a survey that consisted of 2 questions: what is your class level?, and, how health conscientious are you? The possible answers presented to the student concerning class level were freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior. The possible answers presented to the student concerning health conscientiousness were below average, average, and above average. Once the survey was designed we needed a sample to survey. We chose the complete student body at North Olmsted High School to be our population of interest and were given a complete list of all the students attending the school. We then used Minitab software to randomly generate a list of 150 students; a sample size we believed would be large enough for us to run an accurate test. Once the list was generated, we needed to find a uniform way to anonymously distribute the surveys throughout the school. We proceeded to research all the students schedules at the high school, and found the period they were most available to answer the survey. The surveys were labeled with only the student’s name and instructions to answer the survey and return it to our statistics class. Teachers during each period distributed our survey to the selected students.

Analyzing the Experiment

After the surveys were mailed out, we simply waited for the results to trickle back to our classroom for analysis. After 3 days of waiting for surveys to return, 121 of the 142 surveys mailed out were returned. We then input the data into Minitab software in order to run analyses on the data. Initially, we ran a chi-squared test using a 4x3 contingency table of all 4 class levels and the 3 levels of health conscientiousness. The results were inconclusive, as some expected cell counts were significantly too low. We proceeded to group the freshmen and sophomores into one group, underclassmen, and the juniors and the seniors into one group, upperclassmen. These two new groups served the same purpose of distinguishing one group as older. Another chi-squared test was run on our new 2x3 contingency table, and results were still inconclusive. Our expected values were still below 5 for some cells, but they were relatively close enough to 5 that some reasonable conclusions could be drawn. Even though we had two expected values below 5, because our “below average” column did not have enough respondents, we still analyzed our p-value. Our chi-squared test resulted in a p-value of 0.351 which led us to reject our null hypothesis that an association between class level and health conscientiousness existed. Our p-value caused us to fail to reject our null hypothesis at all reasonable levels ofsignificance. There was no significant evidence to suggest an association between class level and health conscientiousness. Further testing with a larger sample would yield more accurate results, but we predict the findings would be relatively similar to our test, at least in the North Olmsted High School population.