High School Sporting Event Attendance

A major weakness in our study was nonresponse bias. We sent out 160 surveys, yet we only received 78. The students that chose to respond to the surveys could have different opinions than the populations as a whole; for example, it’s possible that those who responded were more interested in high school sporting events, thus making them more likely to have attended at least one of them. Since we received only 78 surveys, we ended up with 51 freshman responses and 27 senior responses. When checking if our samples were sufficiently large, we determined than n1p1, n1(1-p1), and n2p2   were all well above 10, however n2(1-p2) was less than ten. Therefore, we were not able to meet all of the necessary conditions for our hypothesis test, so we had to proceed with caution. Due to this, our test does not accurately reflect the results of the study.

The results of our study should be extrapolated very apprehensively because one of our samples did not meet all size requirements, so a normal approximation may not fit our data.  Nonetheless, if the size requirement that was not met is disregarded, our results should still be extrapolated sparingly—at the very most to all American public high schools.  The results should not be extrapolated beyond this population because too many variables are introduced when extrapolating to broader populations.  For instance, our results may not be representative of American private high schools because students who attend private schools may significantly differ in terms of school-spirit from those who attend public high schools, and our results may not be representative of foreign high schools because foreign high schoolers may significantly differ in terms of appreciation for athletics from American high schoolers.