Background Research

Is there an association between gender and preferred house pet? Might a persons gender provide a certain inclination to prefer a cat over a dog, or visa versa, for instance? We feel that might be the case. We have resolved to perform a study to attempt to gather evidence in favor of our hypothesis that there is an association between a persons gender and their house pet of choice. We plan to survey 80 randomly selected students from North Olmsted High School. We will acquire a list of all students in North Olmsted High School from Mrs. Caso, enter the data into Minitab, and use the Random Sample From Columns feature to choose the eighty students. We chose to undertake this study because we had an inclination that there might be a statistical preference of house pet based on one's gender, and we were curious whether this may or may not be true. We are interested in this particular study because we ourselves are fans of house pets, dogs in particular, and us both being male, we feel that there might be a correlation between males preferring dogs as house pets over cats for example, and possibly females preferring cats over dogs. We also have to think about whether personality may play a role in preference of housepet. We both have a love for animals and we both have dogs so we immediately had an idea to analyze whether gender played a role in which housepet that person would choose. We want concrete evidence either supporting or rejecting our hypothesis, though. That is why we took interest in, and undertook this study. We then looked for background research pertaining to our study. We wanted to see if our study had in fact been done before. Maybe there was only a study to ours that had been previously conducted. Still, we wanted to know. Every bit of previously gathered information helps. First we had looked up gender and preference of housepet onto google. We found very few links and none of them really provided us with any practical studies. We tried to modify our word usage such as men and dogs vs women and cats, does gender play a role in which pet you like, and personality and housepets. We found that our exact hypothesis was used as an example on technical statistics website Minitab.com. It was used to exemplify cross tabulation, in table-style format. It turned out to be less of a study, however, and more a given example. The personality and housepets, led us to a website that gave us information about why men may like dogs more and women like cats more. It was a summary of a small study done on Webmd.com. The survey asked people to vote either as a dog person or a cat person, and associated those votes with a given personality test. The results concluded that dog people are 15% more outgoing than cat people, and show more social qualities and are generally more extroverted. Cat people were 11% more likely to be open than dog people, showing more creativity and non-traditional thinking. When we searched dogs vs. cats preferred house pet, we found an article on Today.msnbc.msn.com that was more of an editorial, but still, it gave us more insight on peoples views on the subject; we feel that this could still be useful to us for referrence. The article seemed to be more in favor of dogs as housepets over cats in general, boasting a majority 74% of people that prefer dogs over 41% of people that prefer cats, based on a survey done by Associated Press-Petside.com. In conclusion, we determine that an in-depth version of our study, as we have outlined it has not truly been done or recorded. We will take the references that we can and complete our survey and our study with this base knowledge in mind.

http://www.petside.com/article/dogs-vs-cats-who-do-americans-more
http://www.minitab.com/en-US/training/articles/articles.aspx?id=9254&langType=1033
www.stat.tamu.edu/~suhasini/teaching301/11association.pptx
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34746139/ns/today-today_pets_and_animals/t/war-dogs-vscats-winner-clear/
http://www.housepetblog.com/whose-side-are-you-on/
http://pets.webmd.com/cats/ss/slideshow-truth-about-cat-people-and-dog-people