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Our study is stated as follows: “Is there a correlation between the number of texts teenagers receive and the number of Facebook friends they have?” We surveyed a random sample of juniors and seniors at North Olmsted High School.  We asked these selected if they have a Facebook account, how many Facebook friends they have (if applicable), if they have texting, and how many texts they receive a month (if applicable).  We were also interested in determining what percentage of people have a Facebook account, what percentage of people have texting, and how these two values were correlated.  We searched the World Wide Web in an effort to determine if previous similar studies to our perspective study existed.  However, we were not able to find a study that was truly similar to our own.  We were able to determine that the average number of Facebook friends for the average user is 130 friends.  In addition, the average teenager sends 1,500 text messages per month.  Since both are forms of social communication, we hypothesize that the number of Facebook friends a person has and the number of texts he or she receives is positively correlated.

We obtained a sample of 52 surveys since out of the 100 surveys we sent out we received only 52 that were usable.  We were able to make a number of observations from our data.   Out of the 52 people who returned a survey, 45 are Facebook users.  Also, 49 out of the 52 students have texting.   All of the students that did not have texting also did not use Facebook, although there were 4 students that did receive texts, but did not have Facebook. We then ran a linear regression t test with our data to see if there was a correlation between the number of Facebook friends a person has and the number of texts they recieve a month. However we found that there is basically no relation between the two variables, since our coefficent of determination was 0.6%. We decided to take out the outliers and then run another linear regression t test. However, we still did not find a strong linear relationship between the two variables since our coefficent of determination was merely 10.0%.

We then decided to run a chi-square test to determine if there was an association between a person having a Facebook account and if they also had texting. However, our test was invalid because we had expected cell counts that were less than 5.

Overall, we can conclude that there is a weak linear relationship between the number of texts recieved and the number of Facebook friends. However, we had a few weakenesses such as response bias, non response bias and confounding variables. Though despite the weaknesses we believe that our results could be extrapolated not only to other schools in the Cleveland, but also to schools all across the country.

 

The Purpose

We decided to do this study because both of us are active Facebook users and texters.  We also wanted to know more about this subject because both Facebook and texting have become increasingly popular forms of communication in contemporary society, especially for teenagers.  Not only were we interested in seeing if there was a correlation between the two forms of communication, we were also interested in simply determining the proportion of students that use these forms of social communication.  These areas of interest spurred us to ask the question:  “Is there a correlation between the number of texts teenagers receive and the number of Facebook friends they have?”