Cody Olsen
Statistics Term Project
Purpose of the Study: To see if there is any correlation between the number of formal dances
attended during grades 9-12 and the number of different people kissed during that same time frame.
Study Design: Due to limited time and resources for this project I decided to perform a simple
random sample with the employee roster in my office. The individuals in my office range from ages 20 to
60 and they originate from many different states in the U.S. I assigned a 2 digit number to each of our 80
employees and by using a random number generator in excel I randomly chose 40 of them. I then
handed each chosen person a survey with 2 simple questions: Within the grades 9-12, how many
different people did you kiss? Within grades 9-12, how many formal dances did you attend? These were
anonymously filled out and then returned to me. I got exactly 30 surveys back.
The Data:
Statistics for testing correlation
Difficulties, Surprises encountered: One difficulty or surprise that I came across was in the actual
verbiage of the survey question. I did have 2 people ask me what qualified as a “formal dance”. I did
answer their question and I sent a communication out to the rest of those being surveyed explaining
what a formal dance would be. This could be difficult because some of those being surveyed could have
interpreted “formal dance” differently. Looking back, I could have found a better way to phrase that
question.
Analysis: Both of my variables had right skewed distributions. The “People kissed” Variable was
more skewed having a mean of 14.5 and an outlier of 75. “Dances attended” was also right skewed but
did not have any outliers. The critical value for a correlation coefficient of a sample size of 30 is 0.361.
The correlation coefficient from my sample is -0.256. The data from my sample has a weak negative
correlation.
Interpretation and Conclusions: The data gathered proved to have a weak negative correlation.
The information gathered has too weak of a relationship to make any strong predictions when it comes
to the two response variables. The information did turn out somewhat how I did predict in that the very
high number and low numbers of “people kissed” both shared low number of “dances attended” for the
most part. A simple color scale in excel allowed me to see that. But I do believe that any prediction
made using one response variable to predict the other would not carry much confidence.
People kissed
75
50
50
40
35
26
25
25
19
13
13
9
8
6
6
5
4
4
4
4
3
3
2
2
2
1
1
0
0
0
Dances attended
2
5
2
3
6
0
3
7
4
14
2
0
9
2
12
14
10
0
12
12
3
5
3
13
9
1
5
7
2
1