Study done by: Andrea Szeltner & Jen Maroli

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to determine which gender gets more sleep on an average school night.  Many high school students have extra curricular activities, jobs, or homework that they work on until late at night, so we were curious to see the amount of sleep they get, and if there is a relationship to gender. 

Abstract

 

The objective of our study was to determine if female students at NOHS got more sleep than male students at NOHS.  We did background research by looking at which gender of adults and adolescents gets more sleep.  The two largest of our studies concluded that females get more sleep than males, however, the other two studies which focus on adolescents concluded that males get more sleep than females. Based on the size and scope of the studies we looked at, our research led us to hypothesize that females get more sleep than males do.

We surveyed 75 female students at NOHS and 75 male students at NOHS by using a randomized sample from MiniTab.  Only 44 females and 31 males responded to our survey, so we used these results to do a two sample t test.  Our alternative hypothesis was that the mean hours of sleep that the female students received is greater than the mean hours of sleep that the male students receive.The mean and standard deviation for males was 7.094 and 1.080. Our mean and standard deviation for females was 6.375 and 1.479. Our p-value for the significance test was 0.991, which is greater than any reasonable significance level we would have used. Based on this p-value, there is not sufficient evidence to say that females NOHS students get more sleep than male NOHS students.

Our background research gave us mixed results, and initially we were unsure which alternative hypothesis to use for our two sample t test. However, from our study we could not conclude that females at NOHS get more sleep than males at NOHS on an average school night.  We had some bias in our study because some students were unavailable to complete our survey, and some did not respond.  Because of this, we barely had enough data available to use for male students. Because of these factors we only feel comfortable extrapolating our conclusion to public high schools in the surrounding area with similar schedules to the one at NOHS.