Statement of the Problem
The purpose of our project is to see if taste in music plays a role in the intelligence level of teenagers. We’re interested in this topic because we feel that music is very influential for a teenager, and from our high school experience, it seems that there would be a relationship between music taste and intelligence. We have noticed that people who come off as less intellectual seem to all listen to the same type of music and on the other end of the spectrum, those who are smarter tend to have the same sophisticated preferences. With this study, we intend to show the relationship by sampling students at North Olmsted High School by asking their GPA and taste in music.
Abstract
We chose to do a study on the association between music interest and GPA. We chose this study to see if stereotypes about intelligence and music taste were true. From the population of students from North Olmsted Highschool we randomly selected a sample size of 200 students and sent out an anonymous survey to each. From the surveys returned we had 155 valid responses. Our sample size was decreased because of serveral forms of response bias. The surveys asked for the students GPA and favorite artist. We sorted all of the responses into categorical data and had to group together categories a few times to get reasonable expected cell counts. We used a Chi-Square goodness of fit test and found there was not an association between GPA and musical interest. We would suggest further study into this topic because we believe we would get a better, more valid response with a bigger sample size.