FHS Facebook Status

By: Kayla S., Ty P, and Haylee G.

Using an alphabetically numbered class list, we were able to collect a sample of

15 seniors and 15 juniors, for a total of 30 students. We used a random number

generator on the calculator to find out who we would sample. We surveyed them on the

average amount of minutes they spent on Facebook a day.

Using the data, we were able to calculate the sample mean 32.5, and the sample

standard deviation of 93.1. Based on our sample mean, we decided that a right tail area

was needed because our sample mean was greater than the population mean. The null

hypothesis was 𝐻0 : μ=20 and the alternative would be 𝐻1 : μ>20. The null hypothesis

was the average amount of time we would expect a person to be on facebook each day.

Next, we needed the level of significance, which represents the possibility of rejecting

the null hypothesis as true, 𝛼 = 0.01. Throughout our data collection and formulations,

we realized that the level of significance didn’t play a role in our calculations. When

deciding whether or not to use a z or t table, we looked at if we had the sigma, and if it

was population vs sample. Sigma is unknown and the data we had was only a sample,

so we had to use the Student’s t Distribution. Using the sample size of 30, the degrees

of freedom was calculated to be n-1=29. We then took our degrees of freedom, the data

we collected, mue, and the sample mean to find the t value. We used the formula 𝑡 =

𝑋−𝜇 32.5−20
= 93.1/√30 to find t, which ended up being 0.7353954854.
𝑠/√𝑛

Next we had to use the table 4, the degrees of freedom and the t value to be able

to find the P-value. Our P-value ended up being between 12.5% and 25%. Next we can
compare our p-value with our determined level of significance. We see that both

0.25>0.01 and 0.125>0.01 and can therefore fail to reject our null hypothesis𝐻0 . The

only reason that we had a substantial sample mean was because we had about 3

people that spent extreme amounts of time on Facebook compared to the rest of the

sample we collected. So, even though our null hypothesis was over the mue of 20, we

can’t reject the null hypothesis due to the few extremes that raised our ending value. In

the end, we pretty much have to accept that FHS students typically spend about 20

minutes on Facebook, even though our data may show differently.

Minutes Spent on Facebook

Juniors Seniors

5 0

10 120

0 0

0 30

0 10

0 0

15 20

0 480

0 15

0 0
 0 5

180 5

0 60

0 20

0 0

Sample mean = 32.5

sample standard deviation = 93.1