Who Watches Sports More? Males or Females?
Statement of the Proble
The purpose of my study is to figure out whether or not the time spent watching sports was greater for meales than it was for fe at North Olmsted High School. I chose this problem because I believed that the results could be interesting and might even turn out to surprise people. I personally watch a lot of sports, and I do know a lot of my friends, both male and female, watch sports as well. Sports are a big part of a lot of teenagers’ lives and the amount of time spent watching sports could reflect that. With that being said I thought that it would be a fun and interesting study to conduct to figure out which gender watches more sports.
Abstract
First, I decided to do the study on things that I know. So i chose to conduct my study on sports, and then thought it would be interesting to see which gender tends to watch sports more often. So my study would be whether or not the amount of times teens spend watching sports differed with gender. Next I chose my population. I decided to select the entire student body at North Olmsted High School. All grades were included (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior). Next I had minitab generate a random list of 80 students from the entire population of North Olmsted High School. Next I created a survey to send out to each of these 80 students asking them their gender and how many hours per week they tended to watch sports.
After choosing my study and sampling, I did some background research on my topic. My background research was aimed to see if anyone had previously done a study like mine. I found out that the University of Michigan had conducted a study much like mine. They found out that there was little difference in the amount of live sports the males and females watched who attended their school. This showed promise that my study might end up to surprise people. Also I found out that ESPN and Fox sports are dominating the sports broadcasting industry. However, they were losing money due to the fact that people don't watch sports as much as they used to, even though there are a greater number of televised sports to choose from.
When the surveys returned, I inserted the information into minitab. I inserted the person's gender along with their letter answer. After determining that I would not be able to conduct the test with the letter answers in minitab I decided to rank the letter answers I recieved from 1-4. After ranking them, I split my responses for males and females. After splitting the answers, I conducted a two sample t-test. This test compared the mean responses for males and mean responses for females. My null hypothesis was that the mean for males equals the mean for females. My alternative was that the mean for males was greater than the mean for feamles. My p-value for my test ended up being 0.008. This means that I can reject my null hypothesis at any reasonable level of significace. Therefore I would have sufficient evidence to say that the mean number of hours spent watch sports for males is greater than the mean number of hours spent watching sports for females.