Our Abstract
The reason we did this study was to see if there was an association between favorite
sport to play and procrastination level.
We sample about 10% of ________________by distributing 150 surveys to randomly
picked students. We had picked 75 girls and 75 boys to get an equal representation of
gender in our study. Of those 150 surveys we received 115 surveys back. We noticed
some weaknesses in our study which affected our results, please refer to our Discussion
page.
We also did a lot of background research on our topic and we learned a lot about
procrastination and what we can do to reduce it, please refer to the Background page.
We decided to use the Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit test to see if we had an association
between favorite sport and procrastination, but since we had 9 cells which had expected
cell counts less than 5.
After we ran our test, we were given a p-value 0f 0.585, so we failed to reject our null
hypothesis, that there is no association between favorite sport and procrastination level.
If we had a valid test and the expected cell counts were greater than or equal to 5, we
would be able to support this study.
Our Purpose
The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a
relationship between a student's procrastination level and
their favorite sport to participate in. The reason we
intended to conduct this study was to see if the
involvement in a sport raises the student's procrastination
level. We conducted this study because we, the
researchers, are very big procrastinators and we love to
play sports. We noticed some relationship, but it will be
interesting to see what happens in the end.
Background Research
We started our research by visiting our
favorite search engine, Google. We first
searched "Favorite Sport Survey" and clicked
on the first link. For "Favorite Sports" survey
results.
http://teacher.scholastic.com/kidusasu/favspo
rt/resfscbg.htm.
Then we wanted to know what procrastination really is and what effects it had, so we
went back to our friend, Google, and typed "effects of procrastination" and we were
given many sites. After reading through some of them, we stumbled across a website
titled http://www.stopprocrastinatinginfo.com. On this website we discovered what
procrastination really is. Procrastination is the act of putting off essential task until a
later time, most of the time the non essential tasks are done before the critical ones.
We then started thinking why do we procrastinate and the website says there are many
reasons of this habit. For example, we may put things off because we don't enjoy doing
these things. We may think if we can't do it perfect we may as well not do it at all. So
now we know what procrastination is and what some of the reasons for it are, but what
are the effects? On the website we navigated to the "Effects of Procrastination" page.
We read about the various effects that procrastination has on our lives. It can affect our
personal life and also our employment (that can affect the rest of our life).
Procrastination can be very stressful which makes it unhealthy for your body and also
for your relationships. Studies have been done that show anxiety may compromise our
immune system which gives a greater chance for getting infections. The effects of
procrastination is not just limited to stress, but can also effect your finances.
We searched on Google again to see if there was a relationship or difference
between who procrastinates more, males or females. I downloaded a PDF file
which included a study of different reasons for procrastination and between
males and females in school with their GPA. We went back to see if they had a
study of just procrastination vs. males and females.
We did a new search and typed in “gender & school performance &
procrastination” in order to see what the difference is between the genders,
school performance (grades) and procrastination. So we went to our friend
Google and it yielded us a site with the title “Tween time management:
Personality, Gender & School Performance.” This was a study conducted by the
Educational Testing Center in New Jersey. Their study was conducted on middle
school children. They found that the indicated time management is much
different than of adults. The study found that boys are more prone to less school
performance and higher levels of procrastination because boys spend their time
doing other various non-academic activities such as computer gaming, television,
sports and the Internet. The author notes
That is, poor time management practices may lead boys to
spending more time on non-productive activity (if gender
differences in time management lead to gender differences in the
use of time), or else the greater amount of time boys spend on
leisure activities may lead to greater difficulty in time
management. Gender differences in academic achievement . . .
may be partially explained by gender differences in Planning and
other such psychosocial factors/span> (p. 5 of the in press
manuscript).
This shows that boys spend more time doing leisure
activities which results in pushing things back such as important
papers while girls spend their time writing these papers. We
decided to stop our study after finding this amazing study on the
topic that we were researching as it gave us a lot of important
answers to the difference in procrastination and gender for us
teenagers.
Our Study
Our sample consisted of 75 randomly chosen girls and 75 randomly
chosen guys. We obtained our sample by getting the master list of
the students from our teacher, Mrs. Caso. Then we sorted the
students by gender and put them into two separate spreadsheets.
Then we used the sample from columns feature on Minitab and we
randomly chose 75 of each gender resulting in a total sample size of
150 students. Our population of interest in this study was all the
students who attended North Olmsted High School. Our sample
consisted of an equal number of students from each gender and a
variety from each grade.
Survey
1. On projects (any assignments lasting one week or more), when do you start the
assignment: (circle ONLY ONE):
1 - Right Away
2 - In a Timely Fashion
3 - The Night Before
4 - The Morning of (before school)
5 - The Period Before
6 - Minutes Before
7 - The Day After it’s Due
2. What is your favorite sport to play? (Circle ONLY ONE):
1 – Football
7 – Track
2 – Basketball
8 – Baseball/ Softball
3 – Tennis
9 – Hockey
4– Volleyball
10 – Swimming/Diving
5 – Soccer
11 – Wrestling
6 – Cross Country
12 - Other
3. Please circle your gender: MALE
FEMALE
Discussion
WEAKNESSES: There was some weaknesses with our study including nonresponse bias and response bias. Many students who we sampled
attended Polaris or PESOP full time so that resulted in non-response bias.
We had response bias because students had either forgot to circle their
gender or favorite sport, or they circled more than one sport. We also had
another weakness because the questions on our survey could have been
worded differently. Some confounding variables in our study was the
difficulty level of the classes the student was in and the amount of time a
student spends on the sport rather than starting their projects.
EXTRAPOLATION: The population of this High School is unique to _______
this high school and we don't feel comfortable expanding our study to
other populations.
FURTHER STUDY: If we were to do another study about procrastination
and favorite sport to play, we would have to increase the population by
sampling more students at North Olmsted High School.
Conclusion
Since we had few cell counts less than 5, we are not
able to say this study was valid, even though we still
ran our necessary tests, chi-square test. When we ran
the test we were yielded a p-value of .585. We failed
to reject the null hypothesis at the 0.05 level of
significance because the p-values > α. Therefore,
there is insufficient evidence to say that there was an
association between favorite sport to play and
procrastination level.
.