Chapter 9: Facebook’s Popularity with Students

Billions of Facebook’s users spend around an average of 20+ minutes on the site
each day. To see if high school students spent around the same amount of time on
Facebook, we took a sample of 30 students and asked them how many minutes they
spent on the site daily. We found that on average high school students at our school
spend about 9.9 minutes on Facebook every day. The standard deviation was 11.189
and this tells us that our data has a spread of about 11 minutes between each
response. Our mean was below 20, so we used a left tailed test for our alternate
hypothesis.
In order to find our mean, we put all of our data in a google spreadsheet and
used the spreadsheet to make the calculation. We also used the same method for the
standard deviation. We decided to round our standard deviation to three decimal places
in order to ensure that our results for future calculations were more accurate.
Our null hypothesis was given in the problem which is μ=20. As stated above,
we decided to use a left tailed test since our mean was below 20 which allowed us to
make an alternate hypothesis of μ<20. What these two statements mean is that the
average amount of minutes that students spend on Facebook is either equal to 20 or
more, or less than 20. We decided to use a 0.05 level of significance and this will
eventually determine whether we accept or reject the null hypothesis. If we reject the
null hypothesis, then we will accept the alternate hypothesis. If our p-value is less than
our 0.05 then we reject our null hypothesis. If our p-value is greater than 0.05 then we
will accept our null hypothesis. This will determine if students are spending 20 minutes a
day on Facebook or less.
Our degrees of freedom come from the equation n-1. In our instance, our sample
size n was 30. So, 30-1 would give us 29. We would then use this number in the t-
distribution table to find our p value.Then we computed our test statistic using the
X−μ
equation t= . Our X was 9.9, the μ was 20, the s was 11.18, and our sample size,
s / √❑
n, was 30. After using this equation, we found that the test statistic was t= -4.944. We
used the test statistic and our degrees of freedom to find our p-value on the t-
distribution chart. Using the chart, we found that our p-value was 0.0005. Our p-value
went off the chart so it is actually even smaller than 0.0005. Using this p-value we are
able to then test our null hypothesis that says high school students are spending an
average of 20 minutes a day on Facebook.
0.0005 is less than our level of significance of 0.05 so we are going to reject the
null hypothesis that μ=20 and accept our alternate hypothesis that μ<20. This means
that at a 5% level of significance, high school students are not spending 20 minutes on
Facebook a day. Accepting our alternate hypothesis would mean that students are
spending less than 20 minutes on Facebook a day. Our study shows that FHS students
spend less than 20 minutes a day on Facebook.

Null hypothesis- μ=20

Alternate hypothesis- μ<20
Sample size- 30
Degree of freedom- 29
mean - 9.9
Standard dev.- 11.189
Level of significance-0.05; determines if we reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis
We are going to use the T distribution because its a sample
Our sample test statistic is- 4.944
Left tailed test- mean below 20
P-value- 0.0005
We would reject our null hypothesis because 0.0005 is less than our level of significance of
0.005
This tells us that at a 5% level of significance High school students do not spend an average of
20 min on Facebook daily.