Pictures and Quotes

 

Stifling an urge to dance is bad for your health - it rusts your spirit and your hips.  ~Adabella Radici

Abstract

The purpose of our study was to determine whether males danced with more people at the North Olmsted High School 2009 Winter Formal dance compared to females. To begin our study, we attempted to find background information pertaining to our study on the internet; however, we couldn’t find any studies that were similar to ours. We only found websites about dance lessons and getting dance partners which was useless to us. To being our study, we obtained the list of students who attended the 2009 Winter Formal dance and used Minitab to randomly select the 160 students we would survey. The surveys asked the students whether or not they had a date to the dance and how many partners they danced with. Unfortunately, we only got 130 surveys back out of the 160 that we sent out.

We entered the information on the surveys into Minitab and obtained the descriptive statistics separately for males and females. Then, we used the descriptive statistics from each gender to conduct our 2-Sample T-test. We decided to use the 2-Sample T-Test because we wanted to compare the mean number of dance partners for each gender and the population standard deviation was unknown. The 2-Sample T-Test provided us with a p-value of .1114 which was greater than our 0.05 level of significance. This forced us to fail to reject the null hypothesis which stated that the true mean of dance partners for males is greater than females. Since we failed to reject the null hypothesis, there was insufficient evidence to prove our prediction.

There were many weaknesses in our study. We didn’t receive all of our surveys back which proved that there was non-response bias. Also, since the dance was a while ago, some of the students may have not correctly estimated the number of people they danced with. Our study could be extrapolated to other suburban schools in Ohio that have Winter Formal as a school dance.