AP Statistics Final Essay: LDS Dating

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.