Statistical Hypothesis Testing and Moderate Student Essay

Submitted By Brian-Gros
Words: 963
Pages: 4

How Do Energy Drinks Affect Daily Activities of Working, Student Adults?
There have been various studies on how caffeine affects people’s energy levels throughout the day. There are also a few classmates who are doing projects on caffeine as well; however, my study will focus specifically on energy drinks (Monster, Full Throttle, Red Bull, etc...) and how they affect daily activities. The independent variables will be age, gender, type of activity, type and amount of energy drink. The dependent variable will be energy levels.
In September 2012, I distributed a voluntary response questionnaire to 27 students in my Statistics class, (See, Appendix A), to determine how many students actually drank energy drinks on a daily basis as well as determine if drinking energy drinks led to increased energy levels.
Of the 27 students, only 9 students (33.3%) said that they drank some type of energy drink, (Figure 1). Of the 9 that claimed they do drink energy drinks, 6 were female (66.6%, 33.3% of male students drinks energy drinks, Figure 2). I found this stat the most interesting. I did not expect to see that more female students actually drank energy drinks compared to male students. When asked if they noticed increases in energy levels from drinking energy drinks, 77.8% said they noticed some level of energy increase compared to 22.2% that did not notice an energy increase (Figure 3). The mean age of the respondents was 32.4, the median was 30, and the modes were 26 & 30.

Figure 1
9 of 27 surveyed do drink energy drinks
18 of 27 surveyed do not drink energy drinks

Figure 2
18 of 27 respondents were female
9 of 27 respondents were male

Figure 3
7 of 9 students who drinks energy drinks noticed an increase in energy level
2 of 9 who drinks energy drinks noticed no increase in energy level
Hypothesis
In a 2012 voluntary response survey of 27 Statistics students, 26% said they noticed an increase in energy levels after drinking an energy drink. I used a .05 significance level to test the claim that more than 1/4 of the students noticed increased energy levels after drinking an energy drink.
Claim: Energy drinks increase energy levels in more than 25% of the surveyed students.
Hypothesis: In a 2012 voluntary response survey of 27 Statistics students, 26% said they noticed an increase in energy levels after drinking an energy drink. I used a .05 significance level to test the claim that more than 1/4 of the students noticed increased energy levels after drinking an energy drink. The results of my hypothesis testing were as follows:

The test statistic is right tailed due to the alternate hypothesis having an > symbol. The area to the left of z is .8413. Because the p-value is greater than the significance level I fail to reject the null hypothesis. There is not enough evidence to warrant rejection of the claim that energy drinks increase energy levels in more than ¼ of statistic students in this class.
Conclusion
I conducted a voluntary response survey of students in a statistics class to test a claim that drinking energy drinks actually increase energy levels. Of the 27 students surveyed, only 33.3% stated that they drank energy drinks on a daily basis. Of the 33.3% of students who drank energy drinks, 77.8% claimed they noticed an increase in energy levels from it. Given that this was a voluntary response survey and only 33.3% of the respondents claimed to drink energy drinks, the results were not a good representation of