Tuesday, January 1, 2013

I am doing a research paper on heart disease for statistics

I am doing a research paper on heart disease for statistics. ?
I need to come up with a good dependent and independent variable. I am going to compare several communities in my paper. I was thinking a dependent variable could be race, income level, lifestyle, location. Any suggestions? or change my topic?
Other - Education - 2 Answers
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1 :
I don't think you understand correctly what independent/dependent means here. Independent (x) is what does not vary as a result of something else but rather on its own, and dependent (y) is what varies as a result of x, or y=f(x). So things like race, income level, location, gender, age, and ethnicity would most likely be INDEPENDENT variables. And for the dependent one being heart disease, you could formulate hypotheses relating the risk of heart disease to each of the independent variables I listed. Keep in mind you'd next have to either conduct experiments to confirm/dispute your hypotheses or look up data on the exact same theories, as they're called in studies, in journals such as JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) or at AHA's website (American Heart Association). As for lifestyle, that varies and can actually be a dependent variable, so unless you simplify that to TYPE of lifestyle like active, less active, rarely active, or sedentary, it wouldn't work here- too complex to analyze this way. You can also do lifestyle based solely on diet type- Mediterranean, Chinese, Indian, junk food, healthy diet, vegan, vegettarian, low carb, low cal, low fat, etc. Hope this helps.
2 :
The independent variable needs to have a causal effect on the dependent variable. Here the variables you list as candidates for the dependent variable look more like independent variables to me. If your paper is on heart disease and your unit of analysis is communities, your dependent variable needs to be something about heart disease that varies across communities. It could be the proportion of people living in the community with heart disease, it could be the number of ambulance runs in a year for heart attacks. Just think of some variable that serves as an indicator or proxy for heart disease at the community level. Once you have that, think about the factors that you believe influence the dependent variable that you chose. Remember, since you are studying communities, that set of independent variables needs to be community-level variables. It could be the proportion of people in the community who smoke, or who drink coffee, or who don't exercise, or whatever makes sense in your field. Good luck.

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