Health Wars: Are Incarcerated Students Healthy?

Overview

Objectives/Goals I wanted to find out if incarcerated students were as healthy as non-incarcerated students. My hypothesis was that students in jail would be healthier because of the strictness of the teachers and probation staff at Juvenile Hall. Methods/Materials I started by writing my questions. Then I gave a teacher at a public high school 150 white copies of the questionnaire (the control group). I also gave 150 blue surveys to a teacher at County Juvenile Hall. As the surveys came back, I tallied each question on a sheet. Then I converted the answers to percentages and made graphs for each question. To confirm my results, I repeated the process when my project was recommended for the Greater San Diego Science Fair. Now I am working on a statistical analysis of my data for the State Science Fair. Results From the charts and graphs in my first survey, I concluded that my hypothesis was wrong. Students in regular high school were slightly healthier than incarcerated students. The smoking, drinking and drugs use charts showed that students in public school had better health habits. The incarcerated students reported feeling less healthy than the control group. The second survey confirmed most of my results. The rates of smoking, drinking and drug use remained very high in the incarcerated group. They also again reported feeling less healthy. A new question about sleeping habits also indicated that they were more likely to sleep more or less than normal (defined as 7-9 hours). However, in the second survey the actual number of days they reported being sick was slightly less than students in regular public schools. Although the numbers only changed slightly, this was the opposite result from my first survey. I am now trying to understand why this answer was different. Conclusions/Discussion I am currently analyzing my data with the help of a statistics instructor, and I hope to have a clearer idea of what my survey means when that is completed. I think some of my data is very good. I also learned that health is more complex than I realized. I think my project's results are important in understanding health issues for children that are involved in the court schools. They may need more attention to health issues than students at regular schools.

Competition history

• CSEF 2003 Social Sciences (Junior Division Only) · Entry J1709

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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