What did we do wrong?

Weaknesses:

Many weaknesses could be attributed to the validity of this study. First of all, we were only able to get surveys to 40 females and 40 males. And, out of these we only received 28 back from the males and 36 back from the females. So, this is a rather small size to sample and might not have given us the same results compared to getting all of our surveys back. Also, when we ran the chi-squared analysis, one of the expected cell counts was less than five. This could cause a major problem with our study, making it less accurate. Finally, a confounding variable for this study could be the fact that, maybe, the longer time that a teenager has their license, the more time they have to get into an accident, get a speeding ticket, or a moving violation. And, if we received more surveys back from older females and younger males, then the reason why it seems females are almost the same drivers could be because of the length of time they had their license.

Extrapolation:

High school students because that is who the study was based on and it was designed to keep them informed. We would probably not give it to insurance companies because it is not valid enough for them to base their prices for automobile insurance on.

Going Further:

If we wanted to continue this study, and make it valid enough to give to insurance companies we would need to get a larger sample size of the population of high school junior and senior drivers. This would give us a better representation of the actual population being sampled. One way that we could obtain this sample of students could be ask various schools to sample students and then compile all of this information together. A second was to obtain this information would be to sample different insurance companies. This sample would probably be the best sample one could obtain because the different insurance companies would have the real data of the students with no bias to anybody.