Aaron

Brodkin
Statistics
P6
1-25-2016

The Average Number of Pairs of Shoes Owned By a Male LASA Seniors

The inquiry being posed in this project was to figure out how many pairs of shoes the

average male senior at LASA owns. At first I was quite stumped on which question I was curious
to know about the general senior population at LASA, but then I realized the answer was
literally under my feet the whole time. I peered into my wardrobe looking down at my 11 pairs
of shoes and couldnt help but wonder if it was normal for teens my age to own as many as I
did. Then it hit me: this project was going to be a shoe- in!

Because I was curious to see if my wardrobe was normal, my population matched my

demographic, male seniors that attend LASA High School. For the sampling process, I first
gained access to a list of all of the seniors at LASA and transferred the data to an excel file. Then
I filtered out the females so I was left with only the male seniors that attend my school. I
assigned each individual a number, then used the random number function in the calculator to
generate a randomized list of 30 numbers ranging from 1- 130, thus creating a simple random
sample of all the male LASA seniors. I then wrote down a list of each individual student whose
assigned number appeared in my list created from the calculator and asked all of them how
many pairs of shoes they owned. Once I received my results, I inputted their student number
into one column and the number of pairs of shoes they own into the second, saved it as a .csv
file and uploaded it to R studio for analysis.
One thing, however, that may have been biased in my sample is the risk of
underrepresentation. The number of pairs of shoes someone owns can be influenced by many
factors: for instance, if the individual in question plays a sport (or multiple sports), then they
will tend to have more pairs of shoes for the different sports they play. On the other hand,
some people only own however many they need, maybe just one or two pairs.

After opening R studio to run up some numbers, I have reached a final conclusion as to

how many pairs of shoes the average male LASA senior owns. The first thing I did was find the
mean of the sample, which came out to be 6.567, but because no one has half a pair of shoes I
rounded this value up to 7. The standard deviation of this sample was very high at 4.58, which is
due to the wide range of responses I received. Some people only had 2 pairs, while others had
20 and everything in between. The next step was to calculate the standard error, which was
found by dividing the standard deviation (4.58), by the square root of n, or the size of the
sample (30) to reach a final answer of 0.84.

The next step was to form my confidence intervals. First on that list is a 95% confidence

interval which is found by taking the mean of the sample (6.567) and adding and subtracting
the t score value (in this case 2.045) multiplied by the standard error (.84 as previously stated)
to reach the parameters of 4.86 as the lower parameter and 8.23 as the upper parameter. This
means that we can be 95% confident that the true mean of the population lies between 4.86
and 8.23 pairs of shoes. The same general procedure is done for 98% confidence: the only
difference is the t score value is 2.058 yielding a range from 4.51- 8.63, meaning that we can be
98% confident that the true mean of the population lies between 4.51 and 8.63 shoes. Lastly
the t score for 99% was 2.30 which came out to a range of 4.26- 8.87, meaning that we are 99%
confident that the true mean of the population lies between 4.26 and 8.87.

After all of the calculations, there are a few things that we can take away from this

project. First of all, that the sample mean came out to be 6.567, and that we are 95% confident
that the true mean of the population lies between the parameters of 4.86 and 8.23. This
ultimately surprised me because I thought that the average LASA male would own around 2 or

3 pairs of shoes, but according to my results they own twice as many. If I ran this survey again I
would create a larger sample size to make for a slightly more representative sample mean than
what I came up with in this survey.