Whether HSE is genuine or not in the evidence of difference in the Assignment

Whether HSE is genuine or not in the evidence of difference in the potential health hazard between workers at the two operations - Assignment Example Exposure to respiratory particles of crystalline silica is associated with several human diseases such as cancer and lung diseases. The disease risk is related to both the total dose and duration of silica exposure. Silicosis, a nodular pulmonary fibrosis, is the disease most associated with exposure to respirable crystalline silicavi. Studies have shown that exposure to crystalline silica can lead to physiological changes, disease and death. There is a reliable link between cumulative silica dust exposure and increased mortality from lung cancer. Calvert et al. found a relationship between crystalline silica exposure and rheumatoid arthritis. Meijer et al. showed significant association between exposure to concrete dust and a small lung infection. xii. There are a number of factors that influence the development of silicosis and these include size of particles, and concentration of silica particles in the air duration of exposurexiiixiv. RSAxv noted that chronic silicosis is mainly the result of long term exposure and that accelerated silicosis can develop after five to ten years of exposure. Morfeldxvi concluded that no other non-malignant health effect due to RCS is as specific and so clearly linked to RCS as silicosis. Research Questions 1. Is there any difference in the health of the workers in the two operations? 2. What associations exist, if any, between length of service and recorded health effect? These research questions will be answered through a hypothesis testing. As Dythamxvii noted, hypothesis testing is the cornerstone of scientific analysis. Tests are carried out to determine whether a stated hypothesis is correct. The hypothesis is rejected or accepted based on the P-values observed. Usually, the null hypothesis (the hypothesis that nothing is going on) is the one that is accepted or rejected based on the calculated probabilities. Most research will accept or reject a hypothesis at 95% level of confidence. Thus if the calculated p-values from a hypothesis test is less than 5% (or 0.05), we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis. For this study, the alternative hypotheses for which the null hypotheses were tested were: H1: There is a difference in the health of workers in brick and tile operations. H2: There is a statistically significant association between length of service and recorded health effect. Study Methodology Primary data was collected from a sample of 65 workers randomly selected for blood testing, 38 from brick operations and 27 from tile operations. The study collected data on their identity, the sectors in which they worked, the length of service of each employee, their ages, and health. Following Dythamxviii, the first hypothesis was tested using independent samples t-test since the data was unpaired and the dependent variable was a continuous variable. Minitab 16 was used to perform a two-sample t-test to assess whether there were any differences in the health of workers in the two operations. The existence of association between length of service and recorded health effect was assessed using the Pearson’s product-moment correlation. Descriptive Results Descriptive results are presented and show the number of observations (N), mean, standard deviation, minimum values, first quartile (Q1), median, third quartile (Q3), maximum values, skewness and kurtosis. The normality tests are also shown together with the descriptive results. These are graphically presented for the three main variables of the study namely age (years), length of service (years), and % of damaged cells. Figure 1: Descriptive