Potential Caveats of Case Study Research for Wake Forest
There are three potential caveats that need to be taken into account in this paper. The first is the wattage of the treadmills and stair masters that determines the exercise equipment’s energy usage. The wattage used in this paper was based on online publications by the manufacturers. This number does not take into account the efficiency loss of the treadmills and stair masters as they get older. This would mean that the treadmills and stair masters would use more energy to run. In addition, the wattage for the treadmills was not specific to every single treadmill. Therefore, some might use more or less energy. These differences could potentially change the results slightly. The energy savings a ReRev system provides is solely dependent on hours of use whereas the energy savings new treadmills provide depends on the energy use of the old treadmills. If wattage of the treadmills is off, the overall energy savings of a new treadmill system is off as well.
The second potential caveat is the use of the gym. The results in this paper were based largely on the usage of the gym from Wednesday, March 28, 2012. On this day alone, there was a lack of updates made to the usage chart. This caused assumptions to be made about the number of pieces of exercise equipment used. In addition, there were assumptions made on this day for how long each piece of exercise equipment was used. The weather could also have had an influence on the usage of the gym. On Wednesday, March 28, 2012 it was hot and sunny outside. More people could have been at the gym than usual because of the heat, or less people could have been at the gym than usual because of the sunny weather. The final part of this potential caveat was that the use of the gym for every other day of the week was based on a ratio from Wednesday, March 28, 2012 alone. Even if the hours of use were very different, the results of this paper are drastic enough that the change in hours would not make that much of a difference. However, the school definitely should conduct a detailed comparison of actual usage of the gym with the findings of this paper before investing in a system. Their findings will act as a check to ensure the spending of the money on the gym is justified.
The final potential caveat is the price quote of the ReRev system. The $32,000 quote was given from an employee at ReRev. He stated that this number was not exact, but that it was a rough estimate. In order to get an exact estimate, a facility assessment would need to be done in order to determine if spacing is completely compatible to install the system. The important thing to note here is that the price will not change that much. It might go up or down a bit, but for the most part it will stay near $32,000. This means that the results from this paper are still correct. The actual numbers may be off slightly; however, it is nothing that should be of any concern for the overall argument.