Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi, i am doing a project on how your fears change from when you were a kid, to teenager, to adult, and to elder. I got all the procedures and everything else done, but i am stumped on one thing. My teacher wants me to make a table with two graphs, and i asked her how she just said i had a specially hard one, since others had measurements with soda's and how gum affects your test scores, so it seems mine is difficult. I asked my parents, cousins, even my grandparents who used to teach, but no luck, any suggestions on how to do this, or how to get started, i have been stumped for three days trying to figure something out, and it's do in two days!

Hi Ranz,

I'm sorry it's taken awhile for anyone to respond to your question, and I hope this isn't too late for you, but one graph idea I had is that you could make a bar graph. You'll need to group your fears into categories, by finding things that seem to fit together. I can't tell you what those would be, because I don't know what sort of fears you found out about, but I'd guess something like "imaginary terrors" which might include monsters under the bed, and such things could be one and something like "death" could be another which might include things like dying young or dying in particular ways. You'd have to look at your specific fears to figure out why. Then, once they are grouped you would graph the percentage of people within each age group (again, you'll have to categorize age ranges into kid, teenager, adult, elder) have fears within these specific categories. This will allow you to see what types of fears people have and how they change with age.

I hope this helps! Let us know what you ended up doing.
JMP