How Are We Going To Do Our Experiment?

We have decided to conduct our experiment in school as our school has students that are within our target group, which is 18 to 25 years of age.

For each student whom we decide to take their blood pressure(BP), will be well-instructed and also we'll explain to them our purpose for carrying out the experiment. It is important to be ethical and ask them for permission as we do not want to force them into our experiment.

We are using a sphygmomanometer as well as a stethoscope for our experiment and only one of us is going to take the blood pressure.

The instructions we'll be giving them are:

- Relax

- Sitting in an upright position, without crossing legs

- Not to talk when BP being taken

- To do some exercise after taking the first BP

The kind of exercise we encourage them to do would be going up a few flight of stairs or run a few metres to and fro, something active. So after they did their exercise, we will then take the BP again for the 2nd reading.

So that's the plan!

Literature Review

Before we get on with our experiment, we did some research on how exercising affects the blood pressure.

Purpose of literature review: To use the meta-analytic approach to examine the effects of progressive resistance exercise as a non-pharmacological intervention for reducing systolic and diastolic blood pressure in people.

This literature review helps us to start, minimize variables and control our research. We chose reliable blood pressure instrument. Blood pressure is taken by one person before and after exercise in one participant to reduce errors.

We did the literature review about what university of Britain Columbia have done. They want to find the factors that will affect blood pressure and also does systolic BP vary to the same degree as the diastolic BP. They take blood pressure before and after exercise, and then using SPSS to analyse. Their end result showed that the systolic increase about 14.4mmHg, diastolic increase 3.4 mmHg, However this article didn’t give us any results about what the relationship between blood pressure before and after exercise.

James, M.W. & Musini, V. M. Factors affect blood pressure. [on-line] Available:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005673#pone-0005673-t003 (18 July 2010)

What Are Our Variables?

We have 2 important variables which are Independent and Dependent variables, and also 1 Extraneous variable. Our independent variable is exercise, and the dependent variable is blood pressure. The extraneous variable is diet, weight, genes, psychological factors, environment, physical position etc.

It is important to minimize the extraneous variables. This is to reduce the number of errors in our experiment and get more accurate results.

To minimize variables,
- Use the same blood pressure set

- Ask samples to relax before blood pressure taking takes place

- Refrain them from talking

- Position them in the same position

- Get samples from a particular age group

We control the variables that we can control.

About Our Question

So this is our question,

"Is a person's blood pressure before exercise related to his blood pressure after exercise?"

Blood pressure is one of the vital signs to provide critical information needed to make the decision, in treatment and also our nursing care. In this case, we want to know how exercising will actually affects a person's blood pressure. We want to know the relationship between exercising and blood pressure and this will help us nurses to better understand our human body.

Hypothesis:

There is significant positive relationship between blood pressure before exercise and after exercise.

Conceptualization:

What is the definition of blood pressure?

Blood pressure is the pressure exerted by circulating volume of blood on the walls or arteries and veins and on the chambers of the heart.

What is the definition of exercise?

It is the performance of any physical activity for the purpose of conditioning the body, improving health, or maintaining fitness or as a means of therapy for correcting a deformity or restoring the organs and body functions to a state of health.

Operationalization:

Blood pressure is measured by using a sphygmomanometer, scale in millimetre of mecury (mmHg).

It specifies exactly what we are going to observe, and how we will do it. Whereby it is to observe the blood pressure difference. It is a description of the 'operations' that we will undertake to measure a concept.

Introduction of us!

The Awesome Group 2!

Nur Maisarah Bte Mohamed M
(Group Leader)

Ma Zin Win Mar

Stella Lim

Tian Yujing

Wee Hui Miao

:)