Social Media Vs. Studying

Introduction

        For our statistics project we are comparing the amount of hours spent on social media (Facebook and YouTube) with the amount of hours spent studying among students at Western Michigan University.  

Our research questions are as following:

1. On average, how many hours per week do WMU students spend on Facebook?

1. On average, do female WMU students spend more time on Facebook per week than male WMU students?

1. What is the proportion of WMU students that are on YouTube for more than 2 hours / week?

1. On average, do WMU students spend more time studying per week than the time they spend on Facebook?

        To collect our data, we felt an online survey was most appropriate in order to get the most amounts of responses from a wide array of students in a short period of time. For the platform of our survey, we used Google Surveys and distributed our survey to fellow students and Facebook friends. Our survey questions were as followed:

1. What's your Gender?

1. What's your Class Status?

1. How many hours per week do you spend on Facebook?

1. How many hours per week do you spend on YouTube?

1. How many hours per week do you spend on studying per week?

        Variables we are interested in measuring are the student’s gender, the student’s amount of time spent on social media (Facebook vs. YouTube), and their time spent studying. This student's class status is very important and may comprehensively be able to determine a lot of direction for this data as well. Our group prediction that upper-classmen (Junior and senior status) will spend less time on social media and spend more time studying.

        In total, we received approximately 45 responses from a wide array of students in terms of gender, class status, and times spent on social media vs. studying. We are going to look at the averages of each of the categories to make statements about correlations we have found.

Analysis: Exploratory Data Analysis

Categorical Data[pic 3][pic 4]

        As you can see, most of our respondents were females, but not by a significant amount. However, there are a drastic amount of juniors compared to the other class ranks.

Numerical Data

[pic 5]

        As shown above, based on the mean of our results students spend the most time studying. However, this amount is not very significant compared to the amount of hours spent studying. On average students only spend 1.66 more hours studying than they do on Facebook.

Claims to be Investigated:

1. Is there a significant difference between gender and amount of time spent on social media?
2. Is there a significant difference between class rank (upper and lower class) and amount of time on social media?
3. Is there a significant difference in the average time spent studying vs. social media?

We will analyze these claims by using the data we have already collected and use MiniTab statistical functions to compare our different datasets based on the claims above.