ISP 120 - Quantitative Reasoning
Group Activity 2: Sports Injuries

All group activities must include a signed statement from each group member that they participated fully in the assignment.

Please do the following at the beginning of every computer activity.

a. Open a new MS Word or OpenOffice Writer document.

b. Click on the "File" on the top menu bar, then go to "Save As".   Give your document a somewhat descriptive name (e.g. "Group Activity 2"). Also save the document to the desktop by setting the "Save in" textbox to "Desktop". (Saving to the desktop makes it easy to retrieve your work when you are finished.)

1 .     a) For each pair of sports below, identify the one that your group considers more hazardous to its participants. Don't belabor this.

bicycle riding or football?

soccer or ice hockey?

swimming or skateboarding?

b) Open the file SportsInjuries.xls, which contains recent data on the number of participants in some of the most common sports in the US and the number of sports related injuries treated in US hospital emergency rooms. Sort the data on the number of injuries, from greatest to least. Include the sorted table in your Word document.

c) Using the number of injuries as a measure of the risk of getting hurt, which sports are the most hazardous in the three cases in a)? Of all the sports, which are the least and the most hazardous according to this measure?

d) Do you think the number of injuries is a good measure of the risk of injury in a sport? Can you suggest an alternative way of assessing this risk?

e) Fill column D with the ratio of the number of injuries to the number of participants. (Hint. Type =B7/C7 in D7, and then drag and fill.) This ratio is called the rate of injuries per participant. Pick one sport and in well-written sentence explain what this ratio means for that sport.

f) Sort the data on column D. What are the least and most dangerous sports according to injury rate? Using injury rate, which sports are the most hazardous in the three cases in a)?

g) In a well written paragraph explain the different views you obtain by sorting on the number of injuries and sorting on the injury rate.  In your paragraph give some examples of sports whose ranking changes significantly when looking at absolute numbers and when looking at rates, and briefly explain why the ranking changes.

h) In a short paragraph identify some other factors that are related to the risk of injury in a sport. What other information would you want to have to produce a more complete measure of a sport's danger?

Comment. The preceding problem exemplifies a general principle about the quantitative measures: quantitative measures often shed light on an issue but almost always are incomplete and limited. Using quantitative methods correctly and recognizing their limitations are equally important.