We had noticed that throughout the school, we saw more people with iPhones than Samsung phones. We also noticed that girls had a considerably more iPhones than guys. We wanted to find out if our observations were true, or if they happened to be due to circumstance.
To understand what the hypothetical proportions of users should be, we we searched for information on the proportion of iPhone vs Android for the entire United States. These proportions, as of March 2019, were 0.55 for iPhone and 0.45 for Android. Since our lower bound was 0.45, we decided to use 25 boys and 25 girls for our sample, in order to keep our study valid.
The goal of this study was to see and compare the proportions of people who owned apple
phones to the people who owned samsung phones. This proportions were split based on gender, as one of the main questions we're trying to answer is if gender plays a role in a person's phone selection.
We began our background research by looking for people who had done similar projects in the past at http://www.nohsteachers.info/StudentProjects/comprehensive.html. As it turned out, a student three years ago did a similar study looking at the proportions of North Olmsted High School students who owned an iPhone versus those who owned an Android. He ended up having sufficient evidence to say that there was a difference between the two proportions. However, he was only looking to see if there was a difference in the proportions. He wasn’t comparing male and female, seeing if one proportion was greater than the other, etc. Of course, we can’t rely on this information alone, as times have changed in the past couple of years and the proportions have likely changed.
To get an idea of what the hypothetical population proportion should be, we searched for information on the proportion of Android versus iPhone for the entire United States. We found multiple websites, but the most current and accurate seemed to be here: http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-states-of-america. The proportions, as of March 2019, are approximately 0.45 and 0.55 for Android and iPhone, respectively. This helped us decide on how many people we wanted to include in our study. Since the lower end is at 0.45, we thought we would do 25 people of each gender in our study to keep n(1-p) greater than 10.
We also researched the phone preferences by gender since our study will look at what boys and girls in our school own. We used Google to try to find studies on if there is a phone preference discrepancy between the two genders. We used keywords like “gender,” “phone preference,” and “Iphone vs Android.” Unfortunately, we found some outdated studies and surveys. Therefore, the data may misrepresent the actual statistics for this current year. Some of the studies we looked at are: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271204/android-vs-iphone-mobile-owners-gender/\
Our study is on American teenagers, so a related study we found on phone preferences for college students in Greece (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4e77/1466a7439ef0c7405de7547ef60afd6184f4.pdf); the only problem is that phone preferences are much different in Greece, as http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/greece/#monthly-201803-201903 shows (compared to the American chart from earlier).
A study from 2018 found that almost 82% of the 6,000 teenagers surveyed owned or will soon own an Apple iphone. This information is important when looking at our own data because if it is true, we might want to test the hypothesis that our proportions differ from 0.45 and 0.55. https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-teens-say-they-want-iphones-and-watches-1523375050
However, this study may be a little misrepresentative of the actual population proportion, as this was a survey, and not a true random sample. All of our research helped us find a value for our hypothetical proportion for Android and iPhone: 0.45 and 0.55. Consequently, our study appears to be entirely unique and will hopefully give us some insightful data.