Weaknesses
In any study you will always end up with weaknesses and confounding variables. We definitely had a large response bias. Many of the surveys that we received back were not completed correctly. Some of the respondents chose to be genderless, while others chose to pick more than one sports team. We had to throw these surveys out of our hypothesis test. We also received some non response bias. Some of our sample decided not to fill out the survey all together. Other students in our sample, were unable to be contacted. Some were in Polaris or post-secondary full time, while others were in OSS or ISD for the week. Another weakness involved with our study is the directions might have been too confusing for some people. They might have been confused because "circle one" was located only above the genders and not by the sports teams. One of the confounding variables that we had found with our study was that some people don't watch sports so they don't care and just randomly choose one of the teams which could have really messed with our results. Some people may not have ever heard of the teams like the Lake Erie Monsters because they are a relatively new team.
Extrapolation
Our results can be extrapolated to other surrounding schools in our
area. This is due to the fact that it only involve Cleveland Sports
teams, and which team students prefer to watch. The results also should
not be extrapolated to areas different from ours, because different
cultures and areas have different favorite sports to watch. these
results could not be extrapolated to schools out of the Cleveland area
since it only involved Cleveland teams.
Suggestions
More advanced work that is similar to our study could be conducted in numerous ways. A study could be done by finding the preference of lower grade levels and see if there is a difference between grade level. Another study could be conducted among different school districts to see if different areas, suburban and inner city, have different sport preferences. Also, a study could be done on adults and teens, to see if there is a difference between different age groups and their preferences