Gender vs Social Media

Discussion

Weaknesses: While sending out my surveys, a few unforeseen problems arose. First, when I was sending out the surveys, I found that a few on the students did not have any schedule. This is because they do not attend the high school regularly or they switched school. Also, 50 out of the 150 surveys I sent out were not returned, creating a nonresponse bias. Both of these problems lead to a smaller sample size. I also had a problem with response bias. Even though the surveys were anonymous, people still may not be truthful or would just like to be funny and put a crazy number of hours a day. Lastly, other confounding variables may have affected the number of hours a day people spend on social media besides just gender. Age and parents income are other confounding variables to consider.

Extrapolation: It would be questionable to extrapolate my data to other schools. This is because I only surveyed students at North Olmsted High School. Students at other schools are affected by different geography and socioeconomic factors, which may change the results. I would not advise extrapolating my data to any larger population, like all of North Olmsted or Ohio, etc. Since I only surveyed teenagers at North Olmsted High School, the results of the study may change when adults from other locations are included.  

 Suggestions: My results were pretty limited to only North Olmsted High School. For future studies in this area, I would recommend having a larger sample size including other locations and ages of people to be able to extrapolate results. I would also advise following up on surveys, to make sure you get as many surveys back as you can to reduce nonresponse bias.