Discussion – Measures of Central Tendency

Discussion – Measures of Central Tendency

Key Findings

The selected article, E-Cigarette Use Among Youth in the United States, found that in 2019, 10.5% of students in middle school and 27.5% of high school students reported current e-cigarette use. Among current users, about a third of students in high school and 18% of students in middle school reported frequent use (Cullen et al., 2019). Most current users reported using JUUL as their regular brand. Approximately 70% of exclusive e-cigarette users reported using flavoured e-cigarettes.

Sampling Procedure

To generate a representative sample of students in the United States from the 6th to 12th grades, Cullen et al. (2019) implemented a three-stage cluster sampling process. The first step of this multi-stage sampling technique involved choosing counties or groups of counties as primary sampling units, followed by schools within each unit and classrooms within each school. Through appropriate weighting techniques, such as clustering, it is possible to collect data efficiently while ensuring that it is representative of the entire country.

Measures of Central Tendency

The measures of central tendency reported were means, which were reported to represent the average age of students. Reporting the mean and standard deviation, such as “the mean (SD) age was 16.1 (3.0) years” for high school students, summarizes the centre and variability of age for this group (Cullen et al., 2019). Means help convey typical values, while standard deviations indicate how dispersed the ages were around the mean.

Charts Employed

Figures A and B in this article have incorporated line charts to display trends over time for the most popular flavoured e-cigarettes among participants who used only e-cigarettes from 2016 to 2019. These line charts display changed prevalence rates of fruit-flavored, menthol/mint-flavored, and candy/dessert-flavored tobacco products in current youth e-cigarette users during the four-year period. A quick interpretation of flavour trends can be made by analyzing annual point estimates and confidence intervals on line charts that assist readers in understanding the data better. The authors only used line charts as their mode of dynamic illustrations to show statistical trends emerging from the analysis across several years.

References

Cullen, K. A., Gentzke, A. S., Sawdey, M. D., Chang, J. T., Anic, G. M., Wang, T. W., Creamer, M. R., Jamal, A., Ambrose, B. K., & King, B. A. (2019). E-cigarette use among youth in the United States, 2019. JAMA, 322(21), 2095–2103. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2019.18387

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Locate a quantitative research article that employs the concepts we learned this week –measures of central tendency. Include a link to the article and answer the following questions:

Discussion – Measures of Central Tendency

a) What were the key findings?

b) What type of sampling procedure did the authors use?

c) What measures of central tendency were reported?

d) What type of charts, if any, did the authors employ to describe the data?