Hypothesis:
- The broadsheet or quality newspaper will contain more adverts than a tabloid newspaper because they only their usual readers buying it, which is not enough, therefore they will need more adverts to earn more money as they have less readers.
- The tabloid newspaper will have more pictures than any other newspapers because they tend to be more exaggerate and will use pictures to attract their readers to buy them.
- The broadsheet newspaper should be the most readable, because they tend to use words to describe an event instead of just using big pictures.
- I will investigate which types of newspaper devote the most space to sport and which newspaper devotes the most number of pages to business. I think the broadsheet newspapers will have the most pages for business while the tabloids will have the most pages for sport.
Statistical Method to collect data:
- To find out whether the tabloid newspaper contains more adverts than a quality or broadsheet newspaper, I will use my calculator to find 20 random numbers. To do this I will press the random number pattern (ran#) and note down the number. In some cases the number was too large to be in one of the newspapers so when this happened I moved onto the next number. This may make my results inaccurate because I would not be able to use the last few pages of some of the newspapers. To find out how much of the page is printed with adverts, I will use a ruler to find out the areas of the adverts and divide it by the area of the page.
- In my investigation looking at which newspaper contains the most pictures, I will use the random number table to get random numbers for the pages. When I get 20 random page numbers, I will start collecting my data. If I get the same number more than once, I will move onto the next number. Like before, I will use a ruler to find out the areas of the pictures and divide it by the area of the page.
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To find out which paper has the best readability, I will look through all of the papers and find a story that is reported in all of the papers. I will count the number of words in each sentence, record the data, and use. Less sentences and less words per sentences represents a high readability.
- In order to find which paper devotes the most pages to sport and which paper devotes the most pages to business, I will count the number of pages devoted to the section in every paper and make a statistical analyse.
Problems encountered:
I was not really able to measure the area of each advert, as the length and the width of the article was not always a full number and I had to round it off to the nearest number.
Process data
For my first hypothesis, I made an average for the percentages that I had collected for the three newspapers and used a bar chart to represent the data. The graph showed that the Daily Telegraph (quality newspaper) had the most adverts per page out of random sampling on average. The Sun (tabloid newspaper) had the least adverts per page on average. The results may be biased though if the random sampling is unfair and just happens to pick a number on the broadsheet newspaper advertisement section every time.
After I had collected the data for the second hypothesis, I discovered that the data were continuous but unequally divided; I therefore decided to use a histogram to distribute the results of the picture ratio for each newspaper. As the histogram of the Daily Telegraph had the largest area, it also had the largest picture to paragraph ratio, this was quite unusual because normally a broadsheet newspaper would have more space on paragraph than on pictures.
For the readability of each newspaper, I used a cumulative frequency diagram to represent the data because the number of words in a sentence would add up to a paragraph. I would find the mean of the diagram to find the average number of words per sentence. A cumulative frequency diagram shows how the cumulative frequency changes as the data values increase.
Below are the definitions of a cumulative frequency diagram.
The mean is the average of all the data.
The median is the middle value of all the data.
The mode is the data that occurs the most.
The lower quartile is one quarter of the way through the data values.
The upper quartile is the value three quarters of the way through the data.
The interquartile range is the difference between the upper and the lower quartiles.
I would also use a box and whiskers diagram to display the results. A box and whisker diagram can be used to show how wide the data spread.
For finding the amount of space devoted to sport and business, I would use a pie chart to represent the data since it is easier to use a pie chart to distribute these type of information.