Holly Schmitz

Victor Feldpausch

No One Uses Facebook

For our chapter 9 project, we were given the topic of how many minutes the average
person spends on facebook a day. We based our topic off of an article that was written by
Business Insider in 2015 titled, “Here’s How Much Time People Spend on Facebook Per Day.”
From this article, we gathered the information to assume that the average time ( ) is 20 minutes.
To calculate this, we took a random sample of the students of Fowler High School and we asked
them just about how many minutes they used the social media site. To conduct this survey, we
took the class list from each grade level and chose every third person from the list starting from
the top. We stopped our sample size once it reached 30 people.
For this project, we determined that the null hypothesis (Ho) was = 20 minutes. From
there, we decided that the alternate hypothesis (H1), the hypothesis that we would accept if we
were to reject Ho, was <20. After we collected our data by surveying the students of Fowler
High School, we calculated that the mean for our set of data was =20 minutes. We then used
our data values to determine that the standard deviation for our set of data was = 18.89. Based
on our sample mean and the rest of our data set, we used a two tail distribution.
We chose to use for our level of significance for our data set. Eventually, this
value will help us to determine whether or not we will reject the null hypothesis or not. When
we examined our data trying to see if we can reject the hypothesis of 20 minutes of facebook
usage, we found out we cannot reject because we have over a .50 probability leading to us not
being able to reject Ho=20. Because our p-value was higher than our level of significance, we
have no choice but to accept the null hypothesis that the average person spends twenty minutes
on facebook a day.
Our sample size for this project was n=30. We collected data values from 30 different
students in various grade levels from our school. We determined that our degrees of freedom was
d.f.=29. Degrees of freedom can be found by d.f.=n-1. In other words, your degrees of freedom
will be one value less than you sample size. Both of these values can later be used to calculate
our sample test statistic as well as the p-value for our data set.
In conclusion the average high school student from Fowler High School uses Facebook
an average of 20 minutes a day. This average is equal to the average of an average American. We
determined that the p-value for our data set was too high to reject our null hypothesis. Therefore,
we were forced to accept the null hypothesis of =20 minutes. Finally, with our data set, we
concluded that the average student at Fowler High School spends at least twenty minutes of
facebook a day.