Mathematics essay

Project

Introduction
I have selected the topic of my interest “ What is the average number of hours college students spend on social networking online every week?”. This topic is quite interesting, because technology is developing and enabling people to be engaged into virtual life. Social networking in my research will include active usage of such web sites as facebook, twitter, myspace and also some other, which respondents consider to be social. The hypothesis is that college students spend on average 20-30 hours on social networking online per week. The data for my research was gathered using an online poll and by phone. Several questions were asked:
1) On average how many hours do you spend on social networking websites every week?
2) Do you consider yourself an active user of social networking websites?
3) Please write down up to three web sites that you use the most often.
Also, during this research I have considered gender of respondents and their age, however the age was limited to 18-27 years old.

Statistics methodology

I have recorded the answers collected by phone and through e-mails and poll into the following table:

Table 1. Average hours spent in social networks per week, based on survey of 20 college students
I assume that people of different ages would have significantly different results in this survey, so for this assignment I selected only one division – by genders. Also, a sample of 20 responses is not enough to differentiate the answers and break into different categories if we want to get more or less accurate data.

References

1. Social networking accounts for 1 in every 5 minutes spent online, Moneylife Digital team, retrieved from on Dec 25, 2011
2. Time Spent on Social Networks up 82% Around the World, retrieved from on Dec 25, 2011