data project

Running head : DATA MANAGEMENT PROJECT

Data Management Project on Smoking in Canadian Population

Data Management Project on Smoking in Canadian Population

There had been many studies on the smoking in the Canadian population The Report on Smoking in Canada , 1985 to 2001 conducted by Gilmore (2002 ) was a meta-analysis on the different surveys on smoking which include General Social Survey (GSS , National Alcohol Drugs Survey (NADS , Health Promotion Survey (HPS , The Survey on Smoking in Canada (SSC , The Canadian Alcohol and Drugs Survey (CADS , National Population Health Survey (NPHS , Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey

(CTUMS ) and Canadian Community Health Survey . These surveys conducted their studies on different time frames . Of the 15 surveys on smoking conducted at Canada within 1985 to 2001 , four surveys were not admitted in the Report for analysis due to non-comparability of surveys based on definitions or methods

This data management project looks into the trend of smoking over time While Gilmore (2002 ) focused on the differences of smoking by gender age , and province or region , this project tries to see association of occurrence of smoking with time using the same set of surveys admitted by Gilmore (2002 ) in his Report . The researcher hypothesizes that the number of smokers increases over time from 1985 to 2001

There are two variables in this project : the percentage values of the number of smokers in the surveys as well as the year that the survey was conducted . The year however was converted into scores in using its values for computations while ensuring that differences among years of surveys were maintained . To establish relationship between these two variables (i .e , year and percentages of smokers , the Pearson Moment Correlation was carried out . Table 1 shows the corresponding percentages of smokers for each of these surveys and Figure 1 shows the trend of smokers and non-smokers across time

There was no relationship between year of survey and percentage of smokers , r (11 -0 .584 ,

0 .05 . Although the relationship was characterized to be decreasing over time as may be indicated by the negative value of the coefficient , this relationship was not strong enough to make conclusions that there was indeed relationship between percentage of smokers and years of survey . This relationship is shown graphically by Figure 1 , where it shows that the values vary randomly between 23 and 33 of smokers across time

These results did not confirm the original hypothesis of the researcher that the number of smokers in Canada increased over time . Results of this project suggest that number of smokers in fact plateaus over time This may be due to the increasing awareness of the people on the detrimental effects of smoking to one 's health . Canada was in fact the first to put health warning message labeling on cigarette packages (Environics Research Group Limited , 2001 . Various survey groups as cited by Gilmore (2002 ) suggest that smoking in Canada was highly monitored . These efforts may have affected smoking behavior of the Canadian people from 1985 to 2001...