Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I am doing a high school project where I want to test if the age of a person effects a persons ecological footprint.
I think the most logical way of doing this would be to type the test on paper, and conduct the experiment by just leaving tests at local businesses for people to fill out.
I see many problems wrong with my experiments. Do you have any ideas of how to conduct this experiment better, and maybe on how to display the data afterwards?
Should I try to make my own test, or do you think it would be okay to just use a test from online?
Do you suggest mabe testing a more easier question using ecological footprint?

Tough question. Since there is probably a number of factors that go into calculating someone's ecological footprint, it may just be easier to direct your participants to an online survey. If you did that, would you have them self-report their findings back to you, or would you like them to print out their results? Depending on the number of your sample size, as it is not possible to do a longitudinal study, you may consider separating the data by age ranges for comparison.

Hi,

One more thing to (carefully) consider is the wording and thought of what exactly it is you want to measure in your survey. For example, the title "effects of age" seems to suggest a causative relationship rather than a correlative one, and a survey won't be able to give you causative data. Moreover, I'm not sure it would really make sense to "vary" age and try to predict a carbon footprint size. Rather, you want to frame this more as a correlative survey; for example, are there differences in carbon footprint sizes between people of different age groups?

Moreover, the previous expert made a very good point that a longitudinal study (over many years) is most likely not feasible, so the best data that you will get out will give you information about the current correlation between age and carbon footprint size. In this case, you definitely want comparisons between age groups rather than some sort of mathematical graph of carbon footprint vs age. Just something to think about.

Hope this helps!
Aaron Lin

Um I think thats what I meant to say as far as my experiment goes. I was going to try to test people of different ages for their ecological footprint, and look at the comparison between the results of the different age groups.. Now that I've really thought about it I feel like its going to be too difficult to get that many people of varied ages to really make my experiment valid. Do you guys have any suggestions on a more simpler experiment concerning ecological footprint? I need a testable question with an independent and dependent variables. Thanks for all the helps so far! I have about a month to finish the experiment, so any sort of help would be appreciated!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP!

I seriously need some help please! I haven't gotten anywhere since I last posted.

Can you tell us how you plan to 'test' someone's ecological footprint? Have you found an online test or something that they can take to determine what it might be? If so, I don't see why you can't just hand out surveys to people of different ages. You might need to lump people into groups--e.g. 'adults' and 'children', but you should still be able to gather plenty of data.

Yeah, well I really don't have a place or the time to really hand something out.

Hi,

Here is an online ecological footprint calculator: http://www.islandwood.org/kids/impact/footprint.php . If you do not have time to ask people to visit this website, why don't you try doing some research and coming up with some hypotheses about how you could change your footprint, then testing them with the calculator?

Thanks Melissa, I was just thinking of doing something like that!

Hey How can I show evidence that I did this project if I did it all on the internet? Please Help!

You should write down all your results as you go through it. You could also capture screen shots of what you did, and perhaps your parents could take pictures of you at the computer. All of those would be potential ways to document what you did.

Thank You! Sorry, but do you also know a way I could make a diagram of an experiment like this?

Sure! I'm not entirely sure what you ended up doing, but perhaps you could show each 'treatment' along the x-axis (e.g. 'riding a bike to work') and have the y-axis be a bar showing how big the carbon footprint is?