dust extinction. Therefore, our method allows stronger constraints to be made on the high-mass IMF compared to the studies that probe Balmer line to UV flux ratios and is an improvement of the recipe that was first implemented by @Kennicutt1983 and subsequently used by @Hoversten2008 and @Gunawardhana2011 to study the IMF at $z\sim0$.

The paper is organized in the following way. Section \[sec:EW\_calc\] describes the sample selection, the continuum fitting procedure, [H$\alpha$]{} EW calculation, optical colour derivation, and the completeness of our selected sample. Section \[sec:PEGASE\_models\] shows how the synthetic stellar population models (SSP) were computed. In Section \[sec:results\] we show the first results of our IMF study and identify stellar population effects that could describe the distribution of our sample. We discuss effects of dust to our analysis in Section \[sec:dust\], observational bias in Section \[sec:observational\_bias\], and starbursts in Section \[sec:star\_bursts\]. In Section \[sec:other\_exotica\] we discuss the effects of other properties such as stellar rotation, binary stars, metallicity, and the high mass cutoff of the stellar models to our analysis. Section \[sec:other\_observables\] investigates dependencies of our parameters with other observables. Section \[sec:discussion\] gives a through discussion of our results investigating the change of IMF and other possible scenarios. We 