Statement of the Problem
These days just about every kid in high school has a phone and texts regularly. This is leading to a growing trend of texting while driving. Our purpose of doing this study is to find out if there is an associate between gender and texting while driving, dealing more specifically with teenage drivers (age 16-18) as they will be our main study. We want to see if the data backs up our prediction that females would be more likely to text while driving then males.
Background reseach
Our first step was to go to Google and type in “gender and texting while driving”. We clicked on the first link on Google and it took us to a page with multiple studies done on roles that gender plays while behind the wheel. The data was collected on July 14th, 2010 so it is recent enough to be valid. One of the studies was “Who texts while driving?” with the studies showing that out of a sample of 251 males and 251 females, they were equally likely to admit that they texted at least once a week, at 24%. This is good information, but it is not age specific. It does not specify the age of the people surveyed, so our research continues.
After going back to the original Google page, we searched a bit more, clicking on mostly useless forum links. On the bottom of the page, however, we foundd another potentially useful link. The page had a study done by “The Allstate Foundation and National Organizations for Youth Safety”. According to a survey of 605 drivers between the ages of 16-20, 87% believed that texting while driving is dangerous, but yet 80% of teenage girls and 58% of teenage boys admitted to doing it. This research is much more age specific then the one above, but the difference in the percentages leaves us a bit weary. Could the difference of 34% for males and 56% for females, with the only thing seemingly changing between the studies being age, really be accurate? Or could it just be a form of selection bias? We decided to look further.
After some more research, with mostly unusefull links, we came across another potential study. This study was conducted with 800 interviews with teens(age 12-17), and their parents. The study asked a broad range of questions dealing with different topics about cell phone usage. Luckily, one of the questions asked was if they text while drive. 34% of them reported doing so, with the percentage being the same for males and females. This number is much lower then the values found in the Allstate research, but is slightly comparable to the Telenav.com study, however the Telenav study is not completely valid to use in our case, since it does not specify the age of the persons asked. Also, in this study we have no real way of knowing the exact sample size, as only a portion of the 800 people interviewed would be eligible to answer to this study (those age 16 to 17).
After doing quite a bit of research, we have were not able to find any definitive studies dealing with gender vs. texting while driving for teenage drivers. For the data that we did find, the final results were way too different of one another. We could not say for certain which would be definitive. Another problem is the collection bias the research may contain, as no one knows how many of the people interviewed lied about not texting while driving. Unfortunately, this is a problem that we may encounter in our study as well. This means we have no real guidance to base our numbers off of, as there appears to be way too many variables from study to study. Our case will have to be looked at as it’s own individual research specific to NOHS upperclassmen who drive and own phones with texting capabilities.