Lauren Hamilton

December 17, 2020

Statistics

Women’s First Child

For this report, I chose to focus on the average age of women when they have their first child.
This subject interests me because I had my first child at the age of 19, which I believe to be younger than
most. When collecting data, I chose to sample a random group of 25 of my female peers who have
children. The resulting data is as follows.

19 19 16 16 16
27 26 25 29 20
23 26 18 28 24
25 25 20 16 29
27 26 29 28 22
My original hypothesis was that the average age for a woman to have her first child is 25, with a
90% confidence interval. Once I collected my data, I felt that my original guess had been off. This could
be due to my sample group mostly being my peers, many of which are also young mothers. Expanding
my sample group may have gotten me different results. However, I completed my report using this
sample and hypothesis.

When analyzing my data, it is apparent that it is much more common for women to have their
first child in their teens than I originally thought. In fact, the most common age for the women I sampled
to have their first child was 16. As stated before, this may be due to my sampling my peer group. A
broader sample may have returned different results.
 My next step was to test my hypothesis. I started by finding the mean or average age in my
data, which is 22.76. I have a sample size of 25 with a standard deviation of 4.474744. Since my
hypothesis was using a 90% confidence interval, my Z score would be 1.645. When doing the math, my S
value came to 0.894949 (4.474744/5), and my margin of error came to 1.472191 (1.645*0.894949). This
led to my conclusion that it can be stated with 90% confidence that the average for a woman to have
her first child is between 21.25 and 24.25 (21.29 <u> 24.23). My estimate of 25 being the average wasn’t
too far off, but it does lie outside of the parameters. If I were to pursue this subject further, I would
definitely use a wider sample range in order to get more accurate results. I believe using my peers did
not give an accurate sample.