Math

project

Death Penalty

Imagine yourself sitting in front of a TV on a Sunday morning. While you are

enjoying your breakfast, you saw that two politicians arguing against. They used every
reason they have to support their sides. One of the most common topics for arguments is
death penalty. Death Penalty is perhaps the most common and controversial topics for
arguments. But how certain are they when they pick a side, and claim I support or go
against Death Penalty? Sometimes there are might be outside influences that affect the
decisions making process. For example, wording of something can change someones
point of view. If something that is written in a way that sounds just and correct to
someone, then one must agree what that is. In our experiment, we wanted to test if there
is response bias when we change the wording of the question. We also want to see if
there are bias between not just the wording of the question, but within genders. With this
in mind, we created two different questions. Number one is, Do you support the Death
Penalty?, and the second one is Do you think murders should be put to death? We
hypothesize that more people, regardless of their genders, would say yes to question 2.
We also hypothesize that females tend to said no more than guys do in both questions,
since females less aggressive and more forgiving. There are two null hypothesis that we
have came up, because we are testing both males and females, and each group would
receive both questions, so we need to think about how we are going to make our
conclusion. One way allow us to do this is to make two separate conclusions, and then
compare girls and guys. The first Null Hypothesis is, There is no difference between the
number of people who said yes and no and the expected results in the males group. And

There is no difference between the number of people who said yes and no and the
expected results in the females group. All these two null hypothesis is essentially
testing if people tend to change their answers when we switch the question around. And
in our case, we just have two separate groups, males and females, to support our answers.
The experimental design for this experiment is Blocking. We used this particular
design because it allows us to separate males and females. By doing so, we could see how
each group response differently to each question, and then we could compare each
groups responses afterwards. The treatments for this experiment would be the questions
each group received. In this case, the treatments, which are also the independent variables,
are the questions given to subjects. There isnt really a control, because each individual,
regardless of which group they are in, would received either questions one or question
two. To better illustrate the design, here is the diagram for the experiment:

For this particular experiment, the population would be the entire school. And the
sample would be the 60 students that were chosen randomly. The method we used to
creating our sample is Stratified Sampling. We first separate all the girls and guys into
two groups. Next, we assigned each person a number for each group. For example, for
the male groups, the first person gets 1, second person gets 2, third person gets 3, so on
and so forth. We used the same method to select girls as well. By doing this, we are
actually stratifying who will be assigned to each group. The Sample Random Sample
took place after we separate boys and girls into two groups. We used this method because

it allows us to have random participants. We use the calculator to generate a random

number, until we have selected 30 males and 30 females. We tried to control the bias in
the selection; we want to make it as random as possible so that the participants represent
the population. The process of selecting participants are really simple, we first use the
calculator to select a random number for 30 times to select girls, and then we choose
random numbers 30 times again for guys. We spent about a afternoon to collect all the
necessary data. Here is the raw data table:
Q1 Boys

Q1 Girls

Q2 Boys

Q2 Girls

NO

NO

YES

YES

NO

NO

YES

YES

NO

NO

YES

YES

YES

NO

YES

YES

NO

NO

YES

YES

NO

NO

YES

YES

NO

NO

YES

YES

NO

NO

YES

YES

NO

NO

NO

YES

NO

NO

NO

YES

NO

YES

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO

YES

NO

NO

NO

YES

NO

NO

In order to see the difference of YES and NO answers better, we make a bar graph:

Boys Question 1
answer
15

Boys Question 2
Answers
8.5
8

10
Series1

7.5

Series1

6.5
YES

NO

YES

Girls Question 1
Answers

NO

Girls Question 2
Answers

15
20

10
Series1

5
0

10

Series1

0
YES

NO

YES

NO

There isnt really a perfect-fitted statistics that could represent the data, since if we do
Box and Whisker, we need to know our five points summary, which we cant find in this
particular case because we cant really find the mean or median; we only did one trial.
Testing the data with Normal Curve, the T-Test, or Anova Test, dont work either, since
they all require us to calculate the mean. But one thing we do know about the data, is,
there is a difference between the numbers of YES and Q1 and Q2 in the boys and girls
group. We could use this difference to determine the results, but there are more than that,
We need o know if the difference is SIGNIFICANT enough for us to make any

conclusions. Therefore, we use the Chi-Square Test. The Chi-Square test tells us is that
difference big enough for us to say whether the difference is meaningful or significant.
The first thing we need to do to calculate Chi-Square is to make an observe and
expected tables:
Boys: (Expected)

Boys: (Observe)

Question

YES

NO

Total

14

15

1
Question

NO

Total

4.5

10.5

15

4.5

10.5

15

21

30

YES

NO

Total

6.5

8.5

15

6.5

8.5

15

13

17

30

1
8

15

2
Total

Question

YES

Question
2

21

30

YES

NO

Total

12

15

Total

Girls: (Observe)

Question
1
Question

1
10

15

2
Total

Question

Question
2

13

17

30

Total

To find the Chi-Square, we need to use the Formula:

O represents observe, E represents the Expected, and E is

the summation notation.
Chi-Square for Q1 boys:
(1-4.5)2/4.5+(14-10.5)2/10.5+(8-4.5)2/4.5+(7-10.5)2/10.5=
2.72+1.16+2.72+1.16= 7.76
7.76, according to the Chi-Square P value table, has a P-value lower than 1 percent, because ChoSquare of 6.63 has P-Value of 0.01, and as it increases, the Chi-Square increases. So it would
make sense that 7.76 definitely has a P-value lower than 0.01. With this P-value, we REJECTED
the Null Hypothesis. There is a difference between Q1 and Q2.
We perform the same calculation for the Girls group:
(3-6.5)2/6.5+(12-8.5)2/8.5+(10-6.5)2/6.5+(5-8.5)2/8.5=6.64
This number also provides a P-Value lower than 5 percent, and therefore we rejected this Null
Hypothesis as well.
Now we can make conclusions based on the table. We are only comparing the number of YES
people said when they are given Q1 and Q2.
For boys: the difference between the number of YES in Q1 and Q2 is: 7
For girls, the difference between the number of YES in Q1 and Q2 is:7
Based on the data, we can conclude that changing the wording of a question CAN create
response bias. As shown from the data above, when the wording of a question changes, 7 subjects
from the boys group and 7 subjects from the girls group change their answers. When we add the
word murders to question two, people tend to support death penalty. Therefore, more people
said yes to question 2, regardless of their gender. Our first hypothesis is right. This is the first
conclusion we make.

Now, in order to test if female tend to say no in BOTH questions, we have to make
another Chi-Square to see if we could make conclusions based on the difference of YES and NO
responses between boy and girls.
For question 1:
Observe:

Expected:
YES

NO

Total

Q1(boys)

14

15

Q1(girls)

12

Total

26

YES

NO

Total

Q1(Boys)

13

15

15

Q1(Girls)

13

15

30

Total

26

30

Null hypothesis: There is no difference between the number of YES between Q1 answered by
boys and Q1 answered by girls.
Chi-Square= (1-2)2/2+(14-13)2/13+(3-2)2/2+(12-13)2/13=0.5+0.08+0.5+0.08= 1.16
1.16 Chi-Square has a P-Value greater than 25% and less than 50 %. Therefore, for Q1, we
FAILED to rejected the Null Hypothesis. There is no difference between the number of YES in
those two groups. Therefore, we cant make any conclusion based on that data.
For Q2:
Observe

Expected
YES

NO

Total

Q2(boys)

15

Q2(girls)

10

15

Total

18

12

30

YES

NO

Total

Q1(Boys)

15

Q1(Girls)

15

Total

18

12

30

Null Hypothesis: There is no difference between the number of YES between Q2 answered by
boys and Q2 answered by girls.

Chi-Square: (8-9)2/9+(7-6)2/6+(10-9)2/9+(5-6)2/6= 0.11+0.17+0.11+0.17= 0.56

A Chi-Square of 0.56 is equal to a P-Value greater than 75 percent but smaller than 90
percents. Therefore, we fail to rejected the Null Hypothesis for this one as well.
In conclusion, the data shows that people tend to change say YES more when the
wording of the question change, as evident by how both groups, males and females, said
more YES when they are given question 2. Therefore, there is response bias when we
changed the wording of the question. Another assumption we made was girls tend to say
more NO than boys in BOTH questions, regardless of how might the question is phrased.
We made this assumption by knowing that girls are more forgiving and against violence.
However, data we collected was no strong enough to say that girls said more NOs than
guys in both questions, as shown by both P-values are high than 5 percents. The next step
for us to do is to collect more data until we have a P-Value lower than five percents, and
reject our null hypothesis. Overall, I think this project is interesting. Because we make
several hypothesis and null hypothesis in our experiment, we have to think more about
how to manipulate our data to support our idea. And more importantly, we have to decide
the right statistical tools to help us make the appropriate conclusion.