Maths Statistics - Staying Healthy Can Decrease Health Risks

INTRODUCTION

        I came across an online newspaper article from www.thestar.com (2016), with the headings ‘Malaysians exercise only after health problems’ and it certainly caught my eyes. In the article, Malaysia’s Health Minister, Datuk Seri Dr S. Subramaniam (2016) said that the common age that Malaysians starts to exercise is between 40 to 50 years old and it was usually when they were diagnosed with certain health issues. I grew up knowing exercising is vital in maintaining a healthy lifestyle and I believe others are well informed of this fact too. However, not everyone is truly aware of the health risks that may be prevented when one exercises regularly. Therefore, I am interested to investigate how often does one exercise and I will then relate this information with the health risks that they can prevent.

        As a group, we decided to do this Statistics Project on ‘Staying Healthy can decrease health risks’. We created an online survey using Google form and spread the survey using our mobile application, ‘Whatsapp’. In 5 days, we managed to gather 254 responses where 117 of them exercise regularly and the other 137 does not. Out of the 254 responses, only 13 of them are working and 5 are unemployed. As majority of the respondents are students, it became a limitation to our project. We intended to have an overview of the society however, as we were unable to reach the whole community, our information gathered only reflects data for students.

I decided to focus on the optimal duration a person needs to exercise a day for my individual report. This is because I realised that most people have the basic knowledge on how long you should exercise but not everyone truly understand the significant of the duration they exercise in a day. Referring to BreastCancer.org (2016), it was stated that 1 in 8 United States women will develop breast cancer over the course of her lifetime while a man’s lifetime risk of breast cancer is about 1 in 1000. In 2013, 40860 women and 464 men in the United States died from breast caner (National Cancer Institute, 2016). As women are more prone to be diagnosed with breast cancer, it is important that women should exercise regularly in order to decrease the risk of having breast cancer. Most studies were proven than physically active women have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than inactive women (National Cancer Institute, 2016). Therefore, the aim of my project is first to study on exercise pattern among female and male students and second to increase awareness of breast cancer prevention.

        The date we collected was divided into two categories, quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data is data that can be measured which in the case of our project, there were four which are number of days people exercise in a week, duration of exercise in a day, opinion on the duration needed to exercise in a day and amount of water drank in a day. On the other hand, qualitative data is supporting data to support our project for example reasons on why you do not exercise regularly and do you think you drink sufficient amount of water in a day. However, not all of the qualitative data are used in the report. We also received some illogical answers when we created the section ‘others’ for our quantitative question. For example, a respondent stated that one should exercise 24 hours in a day.

        The technologies used to create this report is Google form, Graphic Calculator TI-84 and Microsoft Excel.

ANALYSIS OF RESULTS

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From the data collected above, we can see a significant difference between male and female who do not exercise regularly. Below are the reasons on why they do not exercise regularly.

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Respondents were also asked, ‘What do you think is the optimal time you should exercise in a day’.

The range from 80 to 120 minutes is considered as an outlier as the data is too far from the distribution. Therefore, it is disregarded in the representation of data.

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Below are comparison of the results for both female and male.

Table 1: Female’s opinions on optimal duration of exercise in a day