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Statistics Chapter 9 Project


In 2015 people around the world spent an average of 20 minutes per day on Facebook.
Since then, we believe that this average has declined due to other social media popularity and
use. To test this theory we asked 30 people from our school, on average, how much time they
spend on Facebook per day. We put all of our data into spreadsheet and found our sample
mean and our standard deviation. Our sample mean is 8.52 minutes. We found this by
calculating the average of all of our data points in our spreadsheet using the formula
=AVERAGE. Our sample standard deviation is 13.46. We found this using the Google Sheets
formula, =STDEV. To test our theory we have to first come up with a null and alternate
hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the hypothesis you are trying to reject or fail to reject. This
hypothesis is based on a previous study for what the average population mean is. In this
example our null hypothesis is H0= =20. W e assume that the null hypothesis is now incorrect
and is lower than 20 minutes. Because of this our alternate hypothesis is H1= <20. So far our
sample mean supports our null hypothesis because 8.52 is less than 20.
In order to reject the null hypothesis, the p-value must be less than the level of
significance. For the level of significance, we plan to use = 0.05 . This value will eventually
determine if we will reject, or fail to reject our hypothesis. In order to find our p-value we will use
the student's t distribution table. We have to use this distribution because we do not have the
population standard deviation. When using students t distribution table we sue the degrees of
freedom instead of the sample size. Our sample size for this data is 30, and our degrees of
freedom is n=1, or in this case 29.
We found our t-value by using the equation t = ( ) / (s/n) . When we substituted our
values in, we found that t=(8.52-20)/13.46/ 30 This gave us a t-value of -4.67. Once we had our
t-value we went to the t-distribution table across from 29 degrees of freedom, and looked for
-4.67. We tried to look for the positive of this value, but it went off the chart giving us a p value of
p<.0005. Because our p-value is lower than the level of significance, 0.05, we reject the null
hypothesis that = 20 and accept our alternate hypothesis that < 20.
This means that the average amount of time people spend on facebook is lower than
what it used to be. Furthermore, this means that Fowler High School students spend, on
average, less than 20 minutes per day on Facebook. This could be because Facebook is not
nearly as popular as it used to be. There are other kinds of social media that are taking up more
time than Facebook, such as Instagram and Snapchat.

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