Average Minutes on Facebook

By: Grace Boak and Kimbria Lance

For our Chapter 9 Project, we must test the hypothesis by Business Insider that the
average Facebook user is on Facebook for 20+ minutes a day. To collect our info, my partner
and I messaged and emailed students from Fowler High School asking them how many minutes
they spend on Facebook on an average day. From our results, the sample mean, or x, of our data
is 11.8 minutes. We found this by putting all of our data into Google Sheets and finding the
average. 11.8 represents the average number of all our data. Our sample standard deviation, or s,
is 36.16. We also found our sample standard deviation by calculating it through Google Sheets.
36.16 represents the range of our data values and how far they are from our mean. I believe our
sample standard deviation was high because we had an outlier in our data of 200 minutes. H₀, or
our null hypothesis, is μ=20. This is the claim that Facebook users spend an average of 20
minutes a day on Facebook. H₁, or our alternate hypothesis, is μ<20. This is our claim that
Facebook users spend fewer minutes on Facebook a day. Based on our sample mean, we are
using a left tailed area for our alternate hypothesis. We plan to use a 5% level of significance, or
α =0.05, which will eventually determine if we reject H₀ or not.
Because we do not know the population standard deviation and our sample size is not
above 30, we are using a student’s (t) distribution. Our sample size is 30, which makes our
degrees of freedom 29. We find this by doing 30-1. We then need to calculate our sample test
x −μ
statistic of t by doing t = . Our x is 11.8, our μ is 20, our s is 36.16, and our n is 30. This
s / √❑
results in our t value being -1.24. Then we use this number to find our p-value in Table 3. Our p-
value is 0.1075. When we compare our p-value of 0.1075 to our level of significance of 0.05, it
is greater. This means that we will not reject H₀ because our evidence was insufficient to reject
the claim made by Business Insider that out of 30 students, the average time spent on Facebook
would be 20 minutes or more.
In conclusion, we can say that at a 5% level of significance, the evidence does not
support the claim made by Business Insider stating that the average time spent on Facebook out
of 30 students is 20 minutes. Our data may not support this claim because students spend more
time on other social media platforms besides Facebook, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter,
VSCO, and Tik Tok. This tells us that among Fowler High School students Facebook is not very
popular, in fact, 15/30 students don’t even use Facebook at all. This tells us that half of our data
spends an average of 0 minutes on Facebook each day. It can be assumed that because we had
an outlier of 200 minutes a day that our average of 11.8 would be even lower, making our
average significantly less than the 20 minutes that Business Insider anticipated 30 students would
be using Facebook. This proves that the average time students spend on Facebook does not equal
20 minutes or greater and the statement made in the article from Business Insider is not
supported by our data and calculations.