Tests and Measurements in Health Promotion Term Paper

The development of efficient health promotion and the creation of a new fitness center implies a detailed analysis and marketing research which can help to reveal the prospects of the new fitness center and its target customer group. At the same time, it is impossible to conduct an accurate analysis without the statistical procedures which help to conduct the quantitative analysis of the new project. What is meant here is the fact that the use of such statistical tests and measurements as null hypothesis, t-testing and ANOVA can help to conduct the research and define the target customer group and prospects of the new fitness center. In this respect, it should be said that the research should be based on the use of the three aforementioned tests and measurements.

The development of the new fitness center should primarily focus on young and middle aged adults who can afford paying for the services of the fitness center. In actuality, it is possible to shape a hypothesis which will be tested in the course of the study. Taking into consideration specificities of the study, it is possible to hypothesize that the target customer group of the fitness will be adults at the age of 25 to 45 of both sexes and, what is more, they are likely to be representatives of the middle- or upper-class. In terms of the study, it is necessary to test the extent to which this hypothesis is correct, i.e. whether the defined group will be the target customer groups and what other customer groups the fitness center can count for.

The subject population can be defined on the basis of the services the fitness center can offer to its customers. In fact, the fitness center aims at the assistance to clients to maintain their health and good physical shape. Therefore, the target customer group is likely to be clients who are concerned with their health and who have already started to lose the excellent physical shape or have got some health problems. In this regard, it is possible to presuppose that people aged above 25 are likely to become clients of the fitness center. Furthermore, the elderly population is not inclined to the active lifestyle, which is difficult for elder people to maintain.

Basically, the use of statistical analysis is an essential component of the marketing research. Obviously, the quality of research may be highly dependent on the quality of the statistical procedures and analysis. In such a situation, it is extremely important to apply effective approaches to the verification of the reliability of statistical analysis and statistical information retrieved in the result of a research. In this respect, the null hypothesis, t-test and ANOVA are particularly noteworthy.

On analyzing various approaches and statistical procedures, it is possible to use the null hypothesis. In fact, the null hypothesis is quite widely spread at the moment since it provides the opportunity to “determine of the obtained results provide the reason to reject hypothesis that they are merely a product of chance factors” (Medical Biostatistics, 1996). The use of the null hypothesis in terms of the research of the target customer group of the fitness center implies that the use of the null hypothesis, which implies that the target customer group of the fitness center will be people at the age of 25-45, is contrasted to the actual behavior of people. In this respect, it is possible to refer to the statistics of the average attendance of fitness centers in the nearby areas. In this regard, it should be said that the number of customers using the services of fitness centers steadily increases, but the major part of customers comprise customers who are at the age of 25-45, although, other age groups are represented in different fitness centers. Nevertheless, the analysis of the statistics shows that customers at the age of 25-45 dominate in fitness centers.

At the same time, it is necessary to underline that any statistical hypothesis, including the null hypothesis, should be tested. In this respect, the article indicates to the fact that t-test could be used for this purpose. In fact, t-test is used for the test of the null hypothesis that the means of two normally distributed populations are equal. Given two data sets, each characterized by its means, standard deviation and number of data points, which can be used for some kind of t-test to determine whether the means are distinct, provided that the underlining distributions can be assumed to be normal. Since all calculations are done subject to the null hypothesis, it may be very difficult to come up with a reasonable null hypothesis that account for equal means in the presence of unequal variances. In the usual case, the null hypothesis is that the different treatments have no effect ”“ this makes unequal variables untenable. In this case, one should forgo the ease of using this variant afforded by the statistical package.

Alternatively, specialists (Campbell, 1988) suggest that in order to test the equality of the means of more than two populations, an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) can be performed. Basically, ANOVA is a collection of statistical models, and their associated procedures, in which the observed variance is partitioned into components due to different explanatory variables. In fact, there are three conceptual classes of such models. Firstly, it is a fixed-effects model, which assumes that the data came from the normal populations which may differ only in their means. Secondly, there is random-effects model, which assumes that the data describe a hierarchy of different populations whose differences are constrained by the hierarchy. Finally, there are mixed-effects models which describe situations when both fixed and random effects are present. In terms of the marketing research of the target customer group, random effects are present because services of the fitness center are available to all customers, regardless of their age, but it is important to remember about the health limitations since serious health problems, such as heart diseases and cardio-vascular diseases prevent people from using services of the fitness centers because work out can be dangerous to their health.

In such a way, the analysis of statistical information reveals the fact that the fitness center can focus on customers at the age of 25-45 as the target customer group because, at this age, people are concerned with their health and maintenance of their physical shape. Moreover, this age category comprises the large share of customers of other fitness centers located in the nearby area. At the same time, the fitness center should not underestimate the potential of the elderly population, since elder people may be also eager to maintain their physical shape, but this group of customers has consistent limitations determined by the poor state of their health. As for the younger population, it should be said that young people are less concerned with services of the fitness center because their physiology allows them to maintain a good physical shape without hard work out.

In such a context, the statistical analysis and the null hypothesis were tested with the help of t-test and ANOVA. As a result, the findings of the research are reliable and valid because they are tested and limitations are taken into consideration. At any rate, t-test is traditionally used when the null hypothesis is true and it allows to prove the null hypothesis. At the same time, ANOVA was used to compare the target customer group to the elder population in terms of the attendance of fitness centers, their physical shape and health.

Thus, it is possible to conclude that the use of quantitative methods of analysis and the analysis of statistical information can help to define strategic development of marketing projects. At the same time, all the hypothesis made in the course of a research should be tested. In such a context, the null hypothesis used in this study can be tested by means of t-test and ANOVA.