THE VALUE OF FACEBOOK
Is there an association between gender and how important Facebook is to them in their daily lives?
Brittany McFarland and Jessica Kwong
OUR STUDY [statement of the problem]
The purpose of our project is to find out how important Facebook is to males and females. We chose this project because many teens use Facebook on a daily basis and it is also the most popular social networking website in the U.S. We were interested in this topic because just about every high school student uses Facebook, including us. Many teens spend hours on Facebook instead of doing other things, like homework, which shows how important Facebook is to them. We think some teens would place Facebook importance above school work at times, showing that it can be a major distraction. We are trying to show that Facebook is more important to female teens compared to male teens. Within our high school environment, we think females would rate Facebook with a higher importance because they are constantly updating their statuses or uploading new pictures. Our test is meant to find out if there is an association between Facebook importance based on females vs. males.
[ABSTRACT]
To start off, we decided that we wanted out topic to me Facebook importance and the genders. Our question was, if there an association between a gender and how important Facebook is to them. We then came up with our population, sample and sampling technique. We obtained a list of all the students who go to North Olmsted High School and used a random generator on Minitab to generate a random sample of 100 students. For those 100 students, they received a survey asking what gender they were, if they had a Facebook account, and how they ranked how important Facebook was to them.
After we choose our study, sampling technique and study, we did some backround research. We found many websites that gave us some backround information on our topic. Through our research, we found out that Facebook has over 500 million users and is still growing. We found out there was a college did an survey like ours. However, their focus was on college students and alumni for that school. From that website, we found out that 78.8 percent of their students use their Facebook accounts daily. A great proportion of these students also spend a majority of their time updating their statuses, commenting of friends’ statuses, and looking and commenting on their friends’ pictures. From another website, we found out that females use Facebook ten percent or than males. This told us that there was an association between gender and Facebook usage, which backed our conclusion.
After receiving the surveys back, we entered them into Minitab and used a Chi-square test to draw a conclusion. Of all the surveys we received back, about 11 of those students did not have a Facebook account, so we did not include these in our study. For the Chi-square test, we made a 2x10 contingency table. When we ran the Chi-square test our fist time, we did not receive a Chi-square value because there were too many expected cell counts that were less than five. We even had a few that were zero. Because of this we could not draw a conclusion. We then figured out that if we grouped some of the ratings together, resulting in a 2x4 contingency table, the expected cell counts will increase. After running the test again, we only had three expected cell counts that were less than five. We got a Chi-square value of 4.998 with three degrees of freedom. This gave us a p-value of 0.172, which was too high for the three expected cell counts that were under five to change the conclusion. We then concluded that there was an association between gender and how important Facebook was to them.