An ergonomic assessment of the airline baggage handler

57A concern for this study is the male female ratio of the test subjects. Out of 642test subjects, only 70 were female (11 percent). Although the majority of baggagehandlers are male, having only 11 percent of the subject pool female is questionable. Thesecond point of concern was that the initial pool of baggage handlers was 896, of which254 were not accessible, or could not be located. It was not clear why these 254 subjectswere not located or reachable, which leaves the reader to speculate about why their datawas not used. There was no mention of how many women was initially part of the 896.If the majority of the 254 dropouts were women then this factor might have had a bearingon the results.The baggage handlers were surveyed using questionnaires before and after theirtreatments sessions. The questionnaire before the treatments included general questionsabout age, sex, and previous back injury. The survey that followed the completion of thetreatments discussed questions about the treatment. The problem with this type of surveyis that it does not give the surveyor any input about the baggage handlers concerns andcomments about their job, which could have been used to improve the study design.Outside of these concerns this study was efficient and through, although it yielded noconclusive results.