AP
Statistics Final Essay: LDS Dating
We decided to do
this experiment because it’s something that hits close to home. People say that
one shouldn't waste time on things that they don’t have any connection with or
they won’t be inspired to go further or make sure it’s done correctly. So
because of this reason, we wanted to do an experiment that we had an
association with. Hannah and I have lived our whole lives in the LDS church hearing
the standards for the youth, one of which being not to date until you are 16
years old. Since we've both seen our friends with their boyfriends/girlfriends
in Jr. High School, we started to wonder how many of the LDS youth in today’s
pressuring times had dated before they were 16 years old.
When we first
started out on this experiment we were going to be using a convenience sample.
After some consideration though, we changed to cluster sample so we could have
a more pure form of responses; convenience samples are usually super inaccurate.
In the end, we decided to change it to a census so there would no bias from us
in choosing who got to take the survey or the complication of assigning numbers
to random people and then picking the numbers for each class that we went into.
We thought it’d be too much of a hassle.
We changed the
survey’s amount of questions to ease the heaviness of the survey and so we
could separate and define which gender and age groups marked either one of the
answers to the main question. The questions we included were: What gender are
you? What age are you now? Have you ever dated before you were 16? Were you
pressured to date before age 16?
In our experiment
there were some things that went perfect and other things that failed to meet
our expectations. All the teachers allowed us to hand out the survey since we
had went and asked them in advance. Only one the seventy was invalid which was
better behavior than we would have thought from these teenagers. Something we
probably could have thought over more and did more carefully was the location.
We handed out the survey in a LDS Seminary classroom with their teachers in the
room so that might have created some pressure. This could have created a
response bias ( they could have just said what they thought we wanted to hear).
Refer to the last
page of this report for the raw data. To collect our data, we went into all of
the seminary classes during seminary on a day when others were not absent
because of their extracurricular activities like dance practice. Going to one
classroom at a time, we gave them the survey after explaining that the results
are anonymous and that the survey needed to be taken seriously. (“SERIOUSLY
KIDS!”) After the students completed the survey we let them put it in a soon-to-be-sealed
manila envelope.
From the data we
found out something we dreaded but admittedly thought we would. There was a
large percentage of the LDS youth that had dated. “Well” we said, “So much for
our purpose.” As far as weaknesses go, above mentioned it talks about the way
we issued and collected the surveys was a little bit sloppy because of the fact
that we had done it inside a LDS church.
For the statistical significance we compared
the pure probability to the percentages that we actually got. There would be a
pure probability of 0% because in an ideal world, where the LDS youth and youth
in general would do what they were told 100% of the time, there would be no
chance of dating before one was of age.
Our data, however, shows that 52% of LDS youth attending seminary in (our town) have dated before they were sixteen… a dramatic comparison to the
original 0% chance. Out of our sixty-nine usable surveys, thirty-six indicated
that they had dated, thus giving us our 52%.
We can conclude from our experiment, that
“It’s really scary… THERE’S NO HOPE FOR OUR FUTURE! IF THE MORMONS HAVE LOST
IT, THEN EVERYONE’S LOST IT!” But we suppose that’s not necessarily true. We
can also conclude that even though 60% of the girls have dated, more than half
of those girls felt as though they were being pressured into it. Although 41%
of the boys had dated, only a little more than a fifth of those felt that they
had been pressured. In total, out of the
53% of the entire sample that have dated, the pressure ratio was 42%.
Some limitations
might be those in areas who have less church members. The results of this
sample couldn't necessarily be applied to those areas because people in
different communities react differently to each individual church standard.
Namely the one of dating; where some may say ‘Who would it hurt?’ and others
would say ‘Evil things will come out of it’. The size of the city could also
influence it differently because there would be more people who have different
standards and with the need for acceptance growing amongst teenagers the
pressure is different.
The next step
would be to try out this survey in different communities like the ones we had
mentioned above. It’d be interesting to see how the results from a small town
community like (our town) would compare to those of Seminary classes in New York
City or third-world countries like Africa. They would need to hand out the same
exact surveys. It might be best to get one of the kids from there to hand them
out and to explain it so the survey doesn't feel so pressured and formal.
A different way we
could further this experiment is in checking in on these same teenagers in the
next couple decades to see whether they had stayed in their faith or not.
