Thursday, January 23, 2014

Bullying Results

The largest project I worked on this quarter was going through bully survey results all the way from 2005.  I worked with Manda Pahl and she accomplished the feat of finding out the confidence interval for spring vs. fall amounts of bullying.  You can find more of that information in her blog!  We met up with the counselors a couple of times who handed us paper copies of the data and then virtually sent Mr. Pethan data as well.  Our first step was to figure out what we wanted to do with all the years of data they had conveniently collected.  I decided to work with separate grades and genders. 



As you can see, gender results varied on the differing seasons/years.  I was surprised to find out that there was not a consistent trend within genders! I expected the complete opposite, finding that one gender was bullied more frequently.  I found this out by putting it into statkey under descriptive statistics for two categorical variables.  The variables were gender and whether or not they had been bullied in that particular season.  I then found proportions and made the graph pictured above!


Next, I considered individual grades and how they were effected by bullying.  My confidence intervals are as follows:

We are 95% confident that between 26.6% and 36.8% of 5th graders are bullied every season.
- We are 95% confident that between 27.3 and 34.9% of 6th graders are bullied every season.
- We are 95% confident that between 22.2% and 29.5% of 7th graders are bullied every season.
We are 95% positive that between 21.9% and 30.9% of 8th graders are bullied every season.  However, we excluded the first 3 seasons from the 8th grade reports since they were not included in the surveys.


Here is an example of the 5th grade confidence interval:
I put the following grades in the same way as the 5th graders and got the results listed above.

We also concluded that on average, according the most recent surveys, that 94.9% of students know how to report bullying but 74.3% of students bullied do not report it.

It was an interesting topic to take time to look into and I'm glad I got the opportunity!

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