Gender vs Social Media

Purpose & Abstract

Purpose: Social media is becoming a big part in the world today. In the past couple decades, there has been many technological advances in computers, cell phones, internet, etc. I am an avid user of social media, using for many hours a day. I was always curious which gender spends more time on social media. Females are considered more social in the real world than males; I wondered if that was also true online. So the question is, Do females spend more time on social media than men?

 Abstract: For my study, I wanted to find out if women spend more time on social media than men. Women are known to be more social and talkative in real life so I wanted to see if that applied to social media as well. I first searched the internet to see if other studies had been conducted on this topic. Most of the studies I found concluded that women did, indeed, spend more time on social media than men. This supported my null hypothesis. I, then, used minitab to randomly select 150 students from the current list of North Olmsted High School students. After that, I send out surveys to the 150 students asking what their gender was and how many hours they spend on social media per day. I only received back 107 surveys, which lead to nonresponse bias. I am unsure how many people were actually truthful when putting down the number of hours they spend on social media per day, leading to another bias. After putting the results into minitab, I used the 2 sample t-test to calculate the p-value. I found that the p-value was smaller than alpha so I failed to reject the null hypothesis at the 0.05 level of significance since the p-value is less than α. Therefore, there is not sufficient evidence to say the number of hours females use social media is greater than the number of hours males use social media at North Olmsted High School. My results actually contradicted what I found in my background.  Since this study was only of North Olmsted High School students, I would not recommend extrapolating the data. For further studies done on this topic, I would advise using a larger, more diverse sample and to reduce nonresponse bias, there should be a follow up on the surveys.