Risk Lab

The material used in this lab included a survey question and a data table. The procedures are as followed:

* Take the survey on the back of the page, on your lab write, do NOT look at other peoples answers.

* Place your numbers on the board in either the girl or boy table.

* Once we have everyone, we will average the score and place the average in the table on your lab write-up.

* Average the boy’s and girl’s average to find the class average.

After completing the survey we continue onto the data analysis. For this part 4 different graphs had to be made, a personal data, girl’s average, and boy’s average and class average graph. Taking the data from the table, we plot the actual risk on the y-axis and the perceived risk on the x-axis. From there we label each graph, and each point on all graphs with the identity of the risk it represents. Then we draw two lines of significant difference on each graph from (0, 2) to (8, 10) and from (2, 0) to (10, 8). This should allow us to determine how well we did in perceiving the risk.

Moving on to the discussion, during our risk lab I noticed multiple things. According to the class average graph, natural disasters were perceived to be higher than the actual risk as the perceived risk was 6 and the actual risk was 1. Another point on the graph was being slightly overweight where the perceived risk was 3 and the actual risk was 9. In other words, the perceived risk was lower than the actual risk. An accurate point on the graph was AIDS. The class perceived it to be a 5.8 and the actual risk was 5 compared to my response in which I perceived it to be a 6 on my graph. In other words, I had perceived it to be a higher risk than the rest of the class. The graphs indicate to me that how we perceive risk is based on where we live and our perspectives.

The sum up, the main thing I learned from this experiment is that everyone perceives risks differently, just as no four graphs from the data table were exactly...