What do you believe?
Before we begin, some introductions must be made. This lovely website was made by Maria Levanoff and Alec Martinak, the very same people conducted this study. While we may only be high school juniors, we took this study seriously and hope you learn from our results. Enjoy!
To start, with the overview...
The beginning was surprisingly the hardest part, as we had to come up with what it was we were going to find out. In the end, we decided to delve into people's views on global warming, as it is a current global social issue. So, our question became: Is there an association between a person's gender and their strength of belief in global warming?
The first step in our quest for answers led us to the internet, and the wonderful world of Google. There we learned about global warming itself and past studies concerning people's views on the subject, with some of them compared by gender. Sadly, we never found any true studies or convincing evidence either way from a good source, but it still gave us a place to start.
Then came the time to send out surveys. On each one, we asked for the person's gender and their strength of belief in global warming on a scale of 1-10. These surveys were sent out to 100 lucky students, 50 males and 50 females, at North Olmsted High School, who were randomly selected for the survey via random number generators. In the end, we received 63 of the studies back, and we counted one female twice as she circled two answers.
With the results returned to us, we set about running a two-way table chi-square analysis for our hypothesis test. Although even after our data manipulation we still did not correctly meet all of the assumptions, we decided to finish out the test as though those assumptions were met. This then yielded us a chi-squared value of 9.297 and a p-value of 0.01.
This p-value allowed us to reject our null hypothesis [that there was no association between gender and belief strength] at both the normal 0.05 level of significance and the 0.01 level of significance. This then let us say that there was enough evidence to support the claim that there is an association between gender and belief strength in global warming.
In short, that was the basics of our study. If you wish to go more in depth and actually see our processes and data, the handy links at the top and bottom of the webpage will take you through our study.