Week 5 – Final Paper
For your Final Paper, you will apply the knowledge and skills acquired
throughout the course to analyze and interpret a dataset containing
health-related variables to answer health research questions.
Due to the current increase of
diabetes in children, studying factors that affect its occurrence and evolution
is very important. Obesity is one of the key factors affecting childhood
diabetes and health practitioners frequently use the Body Mass Index (B.M.I.)
to assess whether or not a child is obese. In the attached Excel document, you will find data on the B.M.I., fasting blood sugar
levels (F.B.S.), gender (Male or Female), and the clinic where this information
was collected (clinic A, B, or C) for a group of children age 10-14. The
purpose of your study is to analyze any possible relationships among the given
variables. There are three tabs at the bottom of the Excel file which
represent different data set pages: “All Variables”, “B.M.I. of Boys and
Girls”, and “F.B.S. by Clinic”. The “All Variables” page is formatted the
way you would typically see this data displayed in current data analysis.
The first column represents the subject’s I.D. number, the second column
denotes gender (M/F), the third is B.M.I., and the last is their F.B.S
level. Each row corresponds to a child in the dataset, with his/her
corresponding characteristics. For example, the study participant with
the I.D. number 10 is a boy (Gender=M), who was assessed at clinic B, has a
B.M.I. of 28 and an F.B.S. of 92.
Any statistical analyses needed for
this paper, including the corresponding Excel steps and procedures, are
explained in your course text with the exception of providing descriptive
statistics (frequencies) for nominal variables. Descriptive statistics
procedures for continuous variables are included in Chapter 1 of your course text.
Instructions and information on descriptive statistics (frequencies) for
nominal variables are provided in the How to make a frequency
distribution table for nominal data in Excel