Data Management and Analysis for Public Health - Report Writing Management Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

In recent years, overweight and obesity have emerged as major public health issues in the United States. This is due in part to their contribution to life-threatening conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. Nor are young people immune. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13% of high school students in the United States in 2011 were obese. Although some cases of obesity occur due to underlying metabolic disorders, the majority of cases are attributable to sustained excesses of calories consumed (diet) relative to calories expended (physical activity). For this reason, interventions to reduce overweight and obesity among high school students and other populations have sought to decrease the number of calories that people consume or to increase the amount of physical activity people engage in. 

In response to growing concerns about overweight and obesity in high school students, a large municipal school district is considering implementing a physical activity promotion program called “Don’t Just Sit There” in its ten high schools. The intervention is not cheap, however, and in a time of budget cuts the municipal education administration decides to conduct a randomized trial of the intervention in three high schools. The goal is to determine whether the intervention is effective in altering key psychosocial precursors to physical activity, increasing physical activity itself, and reducing the prevalence of overweight and obesity.

Assignment

In this assignment, you are tasked with working on the baseline data. You will be provided with three SPSS datasets (School1PRE.sav, School2PRE.sav, and School3PRE.sav) and a codebook (DJSTcodebook.doc). You are also given a copy of the questionnaire that students were asked to complete (DJSTquestionnaire.doc). The datasets contain the baseline data from the three study high schools, and the codebook and questionnaire contain all of the information you should need to make sense of these data. You are to use SPSS to carry out the following specific tasks: 

1. Merge the three datasets into a single file, DJSTpre1.sav. 

2. Obtain frequencies and/or descriptive statistics on all raw variables. 

3. Following the value-expectancy framework, derive value-expectancies for each of the eight possible outcomes of physical activity (coping with stress, having fun, etc.). Do this by multiplying each expectancy variable (e.g., It would help me cope with stress) by the corresponding value variable (e.g., How positive or negative would you feel about coping well with stress). For example, VE1pre would be defined as A1pre·C1pre. Note that the value variables (C1pre through C8pre) are coded from -1 (Very Negative) to 1 (Very Positive) so that the new variables you compute here can, in theory, range from -5 (Strongly Agree and Very Negative) to 5 (Strongly Agree and Very Positive) 

4. compute Cronbach’s alpha for the eight derived value-expectancy measures (VE1pre through VE8pre), and for eight items measuring self-efficacy (B1pre through B8pre). 

5. Derive a baseline value-expectancy scale score (VEpre) as the mean of the eight value- expectancy measures (VE1pre through VE8pre), and a baseline self-efficacy scale score (SEpre) as the mean of the eight self-efficacy indicators (B1pre through B8pre).