Comparing the length of randomly selected words found in different newspapers via samples.

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1.                                Statistics Project                         By Max Lacome- Shaw

Introduction:

For this project I will compare the length of randomly selected words found in different newspapers via samples. Since different parts of each newspaper will have different writing styles I will investigate three different areas and take a stratified sample to minimise bias. My hypothesis is that broadsheet newspapers will contain longer words on average than tabloids or quality tabloids because broadsheet papers are aimed at more educated people, and therefore will use longer more descriptive and expressive words. As well as this I believe that the quality tabloid will have higher results than the tabloids for much of the same reasons. I also believe that word length in sport articles will be shorter on average than in news articles, and I will investigate this. Subsequently I believe that The Sun will have a larger and probably longer Sports section due to the general nature of the Tabloid. For overall page numbers I believe that the Daily Mail will have the most, due to the fact that its pages are smaller than the Telegraphs and font size around the same, as well as from previous analysis of The Sun, it will have more to write about because of better researchers into its stories.  

The newspapers I used were:

The Sun – Tabloid                                              

Telegraph – Broadsheet

Daily Mail – Quality Tabloid          

To start of my project I needed to get information that would help me reach my goal of finding out what type of paper has the longest, on average, word length. I decided to take random stratified samples from each paper, in the sections me and my group for this period choose. The sections that we chose were:

1. Home News

2. World News

3. Sports News

All three of the stories I used were featured in all three newspapers, making the project more reliable. I could have chosen from many other samples like: Finance, Weather, and Front Page. I then choose three stories from the sections above, these were:  

For Home News ‘Stabbed Baby’ story

For World News ‘Niagara Falls’ story

For Sports News ‘Dwain Chambers’ story

 

First I found the number of pages dedicated to the three different sections in the three chosen newspapers. I did this by going through the newspapers and deciding what was from each of the three sections I had chosen.                          

2.                                                                                                      Max Lacome- Shaw

Here is a table of results, I added up the pages and columns to do this.

 

This table shows me that the Daily Mail had the most amounts of pages with 87; this corresponds with my hypothesis on page 1. The Sun had more pages than the Telegraph; this was probably due to its smaller pages.

I then converted my results from the table above into percentages, I did this by counting up pages and columns dedicated to each topic in each paper and converting it to a percentage.

Example: The Sun: Home News = 14 pages

                Total pages = 64

                                14 divided by 64 x 100 = 22%

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The section with the smallest per-cent I would give a sample of 50 words.

This table shows that my hypothesis was wrong to the point that I thought The Sun would have had a bigger Sports section, by the Telegraph proved to have the biggest.

3.                                                                                 Max Lacome- Shaw

As well as this because of the Daily Mails small per-cant of Sports News, just 2%, if gave the Telegraph a 200 word sample.  

I selected a stratified sample as ...

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