GCSE Statistics Coursework

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        Statistics Coursework

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The Daily Mail has a higher average circulation (Circulation refers to the number of sold, reduced price and free copies of a title distributed on an average day over the stated period of time.) This leads me to believe that the Daily Mail is a more popular newspaper by a large margin. I believe this because the Daily Mail average circulation is 39.5% higher than the Daily Mirror. Furthermore the Daily Mail could not have achieved a 40% higher average than the Daily Mirror within a day. This leads me to believe that the Daily Mail has had a strong solid and larger user base than the Daily Mirror for a long period of time. I obtained my secondary data from .

Average Circulation: -

Daily Mail = 2,350,694

Daily Mirror = 1,684,660

Hypothesis One: -

        “Daily Mail will have more adverts than the Daily Mirror.”

        I believe The Daily Mail will have more adverts than the Daily Mirror because it is a more popular newspaper. Furthermore because it is more popular, business would wish to advertise on it because the adverts would get more exposure because more people read the Daily Mail. To add, because more people read the newspaper it would give the adverts a higher success rate, also customers who have had a good experience may recommend it to their friends who in turn would advertise in the Daily Mail. I will need to categorise the articles in the newspaper, this will tell me the total number of articles in the newspapers (excluding and including adverts). I can use this data to create a composite bar chart to represent the proportion of the different genre of articles. This will be done so I can use it to clearly show the proportion of different genres. After this I will draw comparative pie chart, the radius of the pie charts will be in proportion to EACH other so it would be easy to compare the proportion the different genre of articles take up. This would also give me a general idea of what type of newspaper I’m dealing with.

Hypothesis One: -

I will now categorise the articles: -

The Daily Mail has a higher number of articles but Daily Mirror has a higher proportion of adverts. 46.6258% of the articles in the Daily Mail are adverts while on the other hand 49.28571% of the Daily Mirror articles are adverts.

I will now need to use this information to make a composite bar chart.

The composite bar chart will visually show this chart, however it will not be able to show it in proportion that is why I need to make a comparative pie chart.

I will now put the radius of the pie charts in proportion to show a fair comparison between the two. I will also use this information to make comparative pie charts to visually show the proportions in comparison to the two different newspapers.

Mirror                                        Mail

280                                        326

 Radius = 6.49                        Radius = 7

7/√326 = X / √280

Or, (7/√326) X √280 = X

Or, 0.39 x √280 = X

Or, X = 6.49

I am now putting the Categories into their respective size in degrees for the Daily Mirror.

I worked out how many degrees each article category would take by doing this: - 38 [No. of Articles] / [Total No. of articles] 280×360° = 48.86°

I will now do the same for the Daily Mail: -

It is evident from the pie chart that the Daily Mirror has a larger proportion of adverts however we can tell from the composite bar chart that the Daily Mail has more adverts because it has more articles than the Daily Mirror.

Hypothesis Two: -

“The Daily Mail will generally have longer words.”

I believe the Daily Mail will generally have longer words because it has a larger proportion of politics and finance articles in comparison to the Daily Mirror. This may be because it is aimed at an audience with a higher grade of education. This is because business men generally have a higher level of education and are accustomed to using high level of vocabulary. This is due to the fact that they must use such vocabulary in presentations and when they are communicating their ideas. I will choose an article in each newspaper which covers the same story; I will then number the rows and estimate an average word count per line. This will tell me the total word count for the articles. I will then use the graphics calculator to randomly choose words from the article. While doing this I will note down the length of each word chosen. I will then using these words acquires the mean, and the standard deviation. I will then use the mean and standard deviation to make a normal distribution diagram. The mean will tell me the average length of a word. This will tell me which newspaper averagely uses longer words. I will then also work out the upper and lower quartiles and the median so I may plot it on a box and whisker diagram. The box and whisker plot will tell me the range of the central 50% of the data to give me a better outlook on the situation. I will then have to check for any outliers. The Box and whisker plot is more accurate than a normal distribution diagram because it is not affected by outliers. However I am doing the normal distribution to see where 95% of the data lies.

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Hypothesis Two:-

I will use random sampling to choose the words in the article.

Quota Sampling:

I also used quota sampling for ‘hypothesis two’; I decided to choose 5% of the words of the population. However at first I chose to do 10% but when I saw that it was too large I halved it.

I also used quota sampling:

Daily Mirror:

10% of 826 words = 82.6 = 83 / 2 = 41.5 = 42

Daily Mail:

10% of 770 words = 77/2 = 38.5 (I decided to round ...

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