Hypothesis and Strategy

Hypothesis and Strategy

The question that we were given to answer for this statistics coursework was:

‘Where in the UK is crime lower?’

I now had to decide a hypothesis on my own to answer this question, to which I decided the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis: ‘The crime rate in 2007 in the West police force regions of the UK was less than in the East police force regions of the UK.’

There were many reasons that I chose this particular hypothesis. First of all, by using the crime rate it makes the hypothesis not too complicated. The crime rate shows the amount of crimes per person, and not the overall crimes in a region; so the crime rate isn’t affected by the population (if the population is large then the crimes would be likely to be a lot, compared to a place with a small population). I chose to us police force regions as they are easy to tell apart, and there are not too many of them, so it would make it easier for me to sample them. It is also easy to decipher police force areas between the areas in the West and the East of the UK than the South and North, so it seemed common sense for me to choose this hypothesis. Furthermore, by using a region of one year it also made calculations a lot simpler than if I used data from multiple years. I predict that the hypothesis will be correct as London is in the East and so will have a lot of crime, and areas like Wales in the West of the UK are not associated with crime as much.

Once I have gathered the data, I will do many calculations and draw many graphs and charts to display the data for the West and East police force regions. I will calculate means and standard deviations for the West and East. I will make a pie chart comparing the total crime rate, and two bar charts to show the variance in crime rates. I will also make frequency polygons for the West and East and also one to compare both areas, to show the concentration and variance in crime rates. Furthermore, I will make a cumulative frequency graph for the West and East police force regions to display and calculate the lower quartile, upper quartile, median and Inter Quartile range; and from this I will then make a box plot to compare, the range, lower quartile, upper quartile, median, and interquartile ranges between the West and East police force regions. These will all help me to either support or reject my hypothesis.

We were given two websites to get data from to use, and I considered data from both sources about population, and crime in different police force area and area of the country. I gathered the data from the sources on the internet that we were given with the web address’ ‘http://tinyurl.com/qdhzs4e’ as it had the total crimes in different police force areas in different months from 31st March 2002 to 30 June 2012;