Patrick+W

=Colorblindness in the Community= toc

Goals:
The goal of the project was to learn about the prevalence of red-green colorblindness in the Belmont Hill community. I am colorblind and I wanted to learn more about the deficiency. My hypothesis was that by testing male students ages 15-16, the percentage of students affected would be close to the U.S male national average of 8%.

Discoveries:
After testing 65 students age 15-16, i learned the the percentage of students affected was 7.7%. I expected the percentages to be close to the national average, but it was surprising how close it actually turned out to be. I proved my hypothesis correct, the percentage I found was only .3% under the U.S national average. I learned that colorblindness is not as uncommon I had originally thought, I found that 5 out of 65 students were affected. This may not seem like a lot, but by proving the national average, my experiment reinforced the prevalence among males because all of the test subjects were males.

Challenges:
The biggest challenge I found was the administering of the colorblindness test. I had to reach all 65 students and administer the test myself which proved to be challenging because many people were all in different places at different times making it hard to track students down. Another challenge was that I did all my testing in school. I had to take up all of my free periods for the testing and this made it difficult to get other work done as well. These challenges, however, were not to difficult to overcome and I did not need to solve any huge problems, it was more about time consumption.

Looking Back:
I wish that I had expanded my test group to females as well. Colorblindness is far less prevalent in females, only .4% in the U.S have the deficiency, but it would have been interesting to see the effect females would have on the test results. I believe they would have lowered the percentages as it is far less prevalent because females are usually carriers.

5 Things To Do
1. Get started early, do not fall behind and limit yourself in your experimentation. 2. If doing an experiment with test subjects, test as many people as you can to get more results and better data. 3. I used a specific age group, to make your data more diverse, consider expanding your age group or any other restrictions you set on your project. 4. Do something that interests you, colorblindness was personal to me so it was interesting, nothing is worse than studying something that is boring to you. 5. Step back and look at the big picture of your project, see how it affects not only you, but the community in which you live in. Do not get too focused on a certain aspect of the project, address all of the factors.

Ishihara Colorblindness Test:
This was the test used in the experiment.