Mens Health Magazine Research - Case Study Example

This cause may be based on observed phenomena that are directly or indirectly related to the deteriorating status of Americans' health. The next step is to establish a hypothesis to rationalize some feature of the observations (Hopper, K., 2008). Again, as far as hypothesis is concerned, the magazine's review has enough reason to speculate that children's overall health is parallel to the general lifestyle of its environment, either sanctioned by the government or common customs. The magazine has enough reasons to suspect that comparing cities' lifestyles would determine the status of children's health in these cities.

The last step of the scientific method is to meticulously test the hypothesis (Hopper, K., 2008). Keep in mind that hypotheses cannot be proven (Samdahl, D. M., 1997). One can only fail to refute it. As early as now, one may actually say that Men's Health Magazine's review on the fittest and fattest cities for kids is a theory that is neither proven nor unproven. Facts about this statement will be discussed below. As a requirement, scientific method eliminates a hypothesis if tests constantly contradict the prediction.

A hypothesis is only as valuable as its capacity to consistently forecast test outcomes no matter how great a hypothesis sounds. One should also remember that a hypothesis or prediction is not important if it is not testable and quantitative (Samdahl, D. M., 1997). Men's Health Magazine's theory is valid, quantitative, and testable. However, scientific method was not used quantifying and testing the publication's theory. The results are also not reliable and tend to change with a little addition or subtraction of the original data gathered.

Men Health Magazine's review was based on these collected data: report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reports by the American Heart Association and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education, statistics of winners of the President's Challenge, statistics by the CDC and Claritas, statistics by Economic Census, and the magazine's survey on the amount of fast food consumed within a month (Colleti, J., 2007). All these were quantitative researches on adults' lifestyle --- their exercise habits and eating habits --- and percentage of overweight adult population.

Other data collected were reports on the number of fast-food restaurants per capita and sports activities (Colleti, J., 2007) offered to each child. A quantitative type of research would have been sufficient for this review except for the fact that all data gathered were mostly reports on adults' lifestyle. It is like judging a building based on the engineer, without consideration to other essential factors such as the owner's budget for the construction, the timeframe given to finish the structure, etc.

While it may be commonly agreed that corpulence is contagious and children have Research Methods 4a tendency to mimic their adults (Snyder, C., 2007), focusing on this principle does not constitute a solid review. As far as health lifestyle is concerned, the