Abstract

We decided to find out if an association existed between the political party affiliation of high school students at North Olmsted High School and their grade point average. To collect our data, we used Minitab to generate a random sample of 200 students; we then sent out a survey to those students asking them if they identified with the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party, or with neither of those parties as well as asked the students to write down their GPAs. We had 116 valid surveys returned to us. After collecting our results, we made a 2 X 3 two-way frequency table that contained two rows for GPAs (one row was for GPAs from 1 to less than 3 and the other row was for GPAs from 3 to less than 5) and three columns for each of the parties. We then ran a chi-square test for independence; the very broad categories for GPA were due to not being able to obtain an expected cell count of at least 5 for every category when smaller GPA ranges were used.  Since our p-value was larger than our significance level of 0.05, we fail to reject our null hypothesis; therefore, there is no evidence that political affiliation and GPA for high school students at NOHS are dependent.

 

Some of the weaknesses of our study include not being able to collect data from students who are in special education classes or do not take classes at NOHS and not being able to use data from surveys that listed GPAs that were impossible or did not list a GPA. Some people also put a range of values for their GPA, which we had to average, and GPAs had varying levels of precision.

It may be possible to extrapolate our results to other schools, but given the amount of variability that may exist among the political affiliation of students at other schools, we would likely not extrapolate our data.