Statistics Controlled Assessment

Statistics controlled assessment

Hypothesis and strategy

I am going to investigate the higher the mean age per local authorities means the less overall recycling. I am investigating this to find out whether or not the older mean age recycles less than the lower the mean age of the authority.

My hypothesis is that the higher the mean age per local authorities means the less overall recycling. I think that the higher the mean age the less recycling they would do. Recycling is becoming more important and more recommended. People are becoming more environmentally friendly and are starting to understand the risks of excessive waste can have repercussions on the environment.  I predict that the older the mean age will recycle less as there not fully aware of the repercussions it has as it wouldn’t have been prioritised when they were in education.

During my investigation I plan to use the data that I have found to compare the mean age form each of the local authorities and the amount of household waste collected for recycling. During my investigation I am going to use the relevant data which can help me to prove my hypothesis. I am going to take a stratified sample of authorities from each of the regions to help me gain a good representation to make my results more accurate and reliable as they would be from a large range of authorities from across the country.

In order to compare the local authority and the mean age I am going to use a more complex calculation as I am going to do the spearman’s rank correlation ion order for me to see what sort of correlation my two sets of data have. By looking at the correlation given by the spearman’s rank it will help to see whether or not the data sets have any correlation. Another more complex calculation that I am going to use is the interquartile range. In my investigation I am going to use box plots and a scatter graphs.

Selection and collection of data

To find the data that I need I am going to use data which was collected in 2011 to 2012 as it is the most recent years which I can collect both amount of household waste and the mean age. The census that I am using has both the data on the amount recycled by the local authority and the mean age of each of the local authorities.  I am using the mean age for my investigation as I believe it will give me a more accurate representation which means my results will be more reliable and accurate. To be able to thoroughly complete my investigation I will need to use 50 pieces of data. I need a large sample of data as it will be more reliable as it would have been chosen from all across the country.

For my investigation I am using a sample size of 50 as it will then give me a better representation and will make be gain more confidence in my results collected where as a smaller sample size wouldn’t be a very good representation. Overall the total number of local authorities is 352 so I have chosen the sample size of 50 because it is a good representation of the data. Once I have calculated how many local authorities I need I will then take a random sample from each of the regions in order to make my data fair and to provide a fair and reliable representation for each of the regions.