c. How will you gather data on the quantity of time people are spending on these different social media sites?
d. How will you gather data on the ways people are using the different forms of social media?
e. How are you going to group the students? According to age? Gender? Class groups? Interests?
f. How many students will you include to get a large enough sample to represent the overall population?
It is important to collect this data anonymously, meaning that you cannot know the identity of the people filling out the surveys. Also, if you are planning to hand out surveys, you may need to get permission from your teacher and the school principal first.
5 Once you have collected the data:
a. Will you separate all the different types of social media or combine them?
b. Will you break down the use of social media per day, week, month or year? It might be useful to use statistics such as percentages of students in the entire school population.
c. How will you present this data in a form that is clear to understand? It might be useful to use tables of results or graphs.
6 Review your findings. In doing so, consider the following questions:
a. Does the data you collected reflect the national statistics for social media use? Why do you think this is the case?
b. How did you lay out your survey? In what ways is it similar or different to the other groups’ surveys?
c. Have any potential concerns come from your study about students’ use of social media? What are these issues?
d. Can you suggest any ideas for follow-on studies?
e. What parts of your findings do you think parents would be interested in hearing? How would you present them?
f. What differences, if any, would you anticipate if you repeated this survey with (i) parents (ii) students in rural Africa?
7 What role do statistics play in informing the public about issues such as social media use? 361
