This paper offers a critique on the quantitative study on Parental Perception of Preschool Child Body Weight. As observed from this article, the number of obesity cases in pre-schoolers has risen to alarming levels, thus, strongly attracting the need for a research to investigate the reasons behind this phenomena. As a result, the paper is based on the thesis statement: Obesity in preschool children is a serious problem, however, this can be prevented if only parents have the right perceptions concerning the body weight of their children. This critique utilizes four criteria to examine the research. These include, protection of human participants, methods of data collection, management of data, methods of data analysis, interpretation of the findings, as well as, their implications for practice and future research.
Protection of Human Participants.
Protection of human participants is well observed in this research. This can be seen from the fact that the researchers had to assure the human participants that by participating they faced no risk of withdrawal of health services from them or their children. Consequently, information consent was given by the subjects (Burns & Groove, 2011). The research indicates no evidence of forced participation of the subjects, hence those that participated did it voluntarily and out of good faith. It is evident from the research that the institutional review board approval did not come from the agency conducting the study. According to the research, while the approval was given by Vanderbilt University, the research was conducted by Western Kentucky University. Having no affiliation with the review board, it is in no contradiction to conclude that the study and the findings thereof were reliable, since biasness arising from the review board approval was off limits.
Data Collection.
Three variables were used in the study. There was one main variable and two dependent variables.
