The Dietary Habits of College Students Victoria Smith-Tyson April 17, 2013 Overview of the Question As most people

know, college students eat a considerably large amount of food, most of it is assumed to come from the cafeteria at their school, but how many students actually eat there? When walking into the caf there seems to be a large amount of students missing daily and most come from a specific year, so does the year of the student determine their amount of visits to the caf? In order to properly answer this question, I went to breakfast, lunch, and dinner and surveyed the students there and asked them their year. After I gather all the data I proceeded to construct and compare the data. Issues with the design Since there are certain requirements for each year to have a specific meal plan and stay in a certain dorm, the data was unreliable thanks to these two lurking variables. There was also the problem of timing and students that ate off campus. Since everyone schedule is different some students come in during the early or late hours of the caf eating their meal and leaving before I had a chance to properly speak with them. There was also the problem with students who worked off campus and brought food before they got back. I also had a problem with surveying the same people multiple times as they came into the caf. Descriptive Analysis of the Data Breakfast Lunch Dinner Total Freshmen 70 110 120 300 Sophomores 80 90 85 255 Juniors 50 60 55 165 Seniors 30 50 20 100 Total 230 310 280 820 First I drew a bar graph to compare the data.

900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 Breakfast Lunch dinner total Freshmen Sophomores Juniors Seniors Total

Figure 1: bar graph of amount of students who eat each meal at the cafe We see that a considerable high amount of students actually utilizes the caf. As we can see the data shifts throughout the day, but overall maintains the skewed to the left image that we began to notice during breakfast. The mean for the total number of students eating in the caf is 273.333 with a standard deviation of 32. 998. Next we will look at a pie graph to get a better picture of the amount of students eating there based on their year.

total

freshmen sophomores juniors seniors

Figure 2: A bar graph showing the amount of students who eat at the caf based on year.

As we can see from the data the freshmen utilizes the caf the most. The mean of freshmen eating at the caf is 100 with a standard deviation of 26.458. The mean of sophomores eating at the caf is 85 and the standard deviation is 5. The mean of juniors eating at the caf is 55 and the standard deviation is 5. The mean of seniors eating at het caf is 33.333 and the standard deviation is 15.258.

Statistical Analysis of Question I performed a t-test on the mean of the differences. The null hypothesis is h: = 0. The alternative hypothesis is h: < 0. In others words, I believe that more freshmen eat at the caf than the upperclassmen at Mercer University. Someone else might believe that the upperclassmen eat at the caf more than the freshmen. I performed a t-test on the mean of the differences under the assumption h: < 0. t= 6.547, P-value = .989 Alternative hypothesis: true mean is not equal to 0 95 percent confidence interval: (70.06, 129.94) Conclusion Since the p-value is larger than 0.05, we fail to reject the null hypothesis. There is not enough evidence to conclude that there is a significant difference between the students year and the amount of times they eat at the caf.