Maths Statistical Coursework

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Maths statistical coursework

In this project, I am going to outline two hypothesise that will differentiate between three newspapers, in terms of their content and style. In order to complete this task sufficiently, I have chosen three different types of newspaper; a broadsheet (The Independent), a tabloid (Daily Star) and another tabloid, but a slightly more expensive one (Daily Mail). The differences between the tabloids in terms of content and style will also be interesting to note. The overall hypothesis, that will be summarised at the end is that the content and style of a newspaper compliment each other in a way that attracts a specific audience to read their newspaper.

Hypothesis

   The first hypothesis is: The Independent will have more politics and global issues with less celebrity news than both the Daily Mail and the Daily Star.

   This will allow me to deduce whether the content of the newspapers are drastically different, in that if this hypothesis proves true, I would then form a link between this and the style of the content.

Method of data collection

However, the way in which I will collect this data is to measure the area of each page that is devoted to global issue, politics, celebrity/ personal stories and other types of story. The way in which I will do this, is to sample 11 pages of the newspaper, by counting the number of pages, then dividing that number by 10, if a decimal, this number will be rounded down. The Independent had 73 pages, so the number was 7. This number is the page that I will measure the area of, i.e if the number is 7, every 7th page would be measured in terms of area devoted to the topics of interest. This is in order to remove bias, as the whole newspaper would be represented within that sample. Also, data from the front page of the newspaper would also be collected, as this is arguably the most important page in the entire newspaper.

  A possible difficulty when recording data could be whole page adverts, being the number of pages apart that I am measuring, for example in the Independent, page 14 could be a whole page advert, then pages 15-20 could have no or relatively fewer adverts yet the next page being measured (page 21) could be another full page advert, if this occurs, to reduce possible bias, I will record page 22 instead and then continue with page 28, as it would be misrepresentative of the newspaper, as the percentage of adverts in the newspaper in my data, would be increased more than it is.

   

How I will use the data

I will then use this data to compare the percentage of politics and global issue stories to celebrity news stories by working out the percentage of each of them in comparison to the rest of newspaper and then looking at and analysing the correlation between them.

Data

The following are tables containing data that will later be represented in the form of a chart or a graph, but are being placed here in order to show the data in its raw form. In order to get this data, I followed the method above, but had to work out the area of each newspaper as a percentage of the total, which is also listed here in the tables. I checked that these calculations made sense by adding up all the percentages, ensuring that they add up to 100%, if they didn’t, then I went back and recalculated the data, checking that I didn’t miss out any individual stories when adding the separate stories areas to form the area of newspaper for each individual topic.

Daily Mail

Daily Star

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The Independent

Graphical representation of data

I have chosen to represent this data in the form of pie charts, as I believe that they are easily comparable by simply looking at the pie charts, of course the topics of interest in this case are politics, global issues and celebrity/personal stories.

Daily Mail

Daily Star

The Independent

Observations

As a result of the calculations I’ve made and the diagrams drawn, I am able to ...

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