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Plan: My Statistics coursework!

Introduction

In my coursework I am trying to prove and disprove my hypotheses that I have mentioned below. I am using two newspapers, which are “The Metro” and “The Daily Mail.”

Students, who use the train or the bus, in the morning, to get to university or school, mainly read the metro. Also, men and women who use the same transport to get to work would also read the paper. These are the papers target audience. So therefore, to the benefit of the students the newspaper would use smaller words or not too complicated long words. Typically, the paper would have smaller words and fewer words in a sentence. We also expect there to be bigger pictures with less text than the Daily Mail.

Older people, educated people and conservative minded tend to read “The Daily Mail.” These are typically the target audience of the newspaper. So everyone would expect that the newspaper would use long complicated words and typically the paper would have longer words and more words in sentences. We also expect there to be more information and less picture (and smaller).

 

Hypotheses

1. “The Daily Mail” has longer words than “The Metro”

2. “The Metro” has fewer words in a sentence than in “The Daily Mail”

3. “The Metro” has bigger pictures (area) than in “The Daily Mail”

Planning of hypothesis 1  

“The Daily Mail” has longer words than “The Metro”

I will sample 1000 words in total from each newspaper.

I have chosen 1000 words because I would want to choose a number of words, which I could draw a decent conclusion with. I don’t want to only take a sample of 20 words as it would not prove or disprove the hypothesis in any way, as it would not be an overall conclusion. If I were collecting 20 words, I could choose 20 big words or 20 small words, which would lead to an incorrect conclusion. It would just be an overall summary of a paragraph or a little tiny section of the newspaper. I would want a number of words, which would figure out a decent conclusion and prove and disprove my hypothesis. If I chose 400 words, this in my opinion is still too less to make a valid conclusion to either proves or disprove my ideas. If I chose over 2000 or something ridiculous like that then it would take me ages just to collect the data then I wont have time to analyse them as the deadline of the coursework would be set.

The data I am going to collect is given numerical values and is called quantitative data. The number of letters in a word is a discrete quantitative variable. So therefore, I am not going to group these. I will have different groups for each number of letters. By grouping them I am restricting the number of groups I have which I think would be a disadvantage when I plot a bar chart or pie chart. This is because, if there is less groups then the bar chart would have less bars and the pie chart would have less number of sectors in them. I could also work out the mean, mode and median as an extra statistics tool. By restricting the number of groups would give a less reliable data because you can’t describe the pattern well enough. For example, if I had 15 groups ranging from “1 letter” to “15 letters” going up in a chronological order I can write a more valid analysis of my hypothesis and making my results more reliable…and if I had 2 groups “1 letter to 8 letters” and “9 letters to 15 letters” then I can’t write an overall conclusion or make a valid accurate data analysis.

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I have decided to choose 10 words from the first 20 pages of each newspaper at random on one day. I have chosen 10 words from each page from the first 20 pages. 20 multiplied by 10 gives 200 words so this is what I would want to collect to analyse later. I will do this over a 5 day period so I reach my target of achieving 1000 for each newspaper. I could choose 10 words from 50 pages in the newspaper but some newspapers don’t tend to have more than 20 pages on a particular day ...

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