Abstract

The driving force of our study was the lone question - "Is there a correlation between a persons gender and the house pet that they are likely to prefer?". We hypothesized that males typically prefer dogs and women typically prefer cats. We began our work by conducting background research on the topic. We wanted to know if a study similar to ours had been done before; if so, we would use its findings to help our own research. After attempting many different websites, we were unable to find any legitimate sources that would help our study. To begin our survey, we both created sample surveys of our own, and would compare the two to decide which one should be distributed for the survey. We selected the participants in the survey by creating a list of randomly selected students from the population of North Olmsted High School using the random sample generator in the Minitab program often used in Statistics class. After distributing our survey, we recieved most of them back, with the exception of three surveys of students that etither no longer attend North Olmsted High School, or weren't in class on the day of distribution. There were two surveys that were exact duplicates; identical handwriting and all. So, to rectify this issue, we truncated one of the surveys data from the entirety of the study. We tabulated all of the data, each survey producing two variables: gender and pet preference. There were four possible outcomes: a male who prefers dogs, a male who prefers cats, a female who prefers dogs, or a female who prefers cats. In conclusion, we rejected the null hypothesis; finding that our study suggested evidence that there is indeed no correlation between ones gender, and his or her preferred house pet.