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Do AGS students recognize celebrities more than they

recognize politicians?
This statistical research answers the question: do AGS students recognize
celebrities more than they recognize politicians? It includes statistical
evidence and explanations about the results.
Maddi Durrett
AP Statistics
7th Period
May 16, 2014

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Do AGS Students Recognize Celebrities More Than They Recognize Politicians?

In todays society the separation between celebrities and politics grows blurry
(Moraski). This is very true because politics and Hollywood have now combined in some
cases. Arnold Schwarzenegger has appeared in The Terminator while Michelle Obama
now guest stars in TV shows such as Jessie, Nashville, and Parks and Recreation. Since
people in politics can also be seen as celebrities, I wanted to know if people, specifically
AGS students, recognized celebrities more than politicians. I chose my population to be
AGS students because I believe these students are more connected to the world. My
guess is that people will recognize the celebrities more than they recognize the
politicians. If this is true, this means that people pay more attention to Hollywood than
they do to The Hill.
To test this experiment, a random sample of AGS students was taken from all
grades. Each student was assigned a number 001-459. Then, a random number table was
used to select 15 students to guess celebrities and the next 15 students to guess
politicians, resulting with a total of 30 subjects. This sample may have not been
representative of the true population of AGS students because there werent an equal
amount of students randomly selected from each grade. I would assume that seniors
would recognize more celebrities and politicians than freshman would, because they have
been more exposed to the world. Maybe using stratified random sampling would have

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been more accurate for this experiment so there would be an equal amount of AGS
students randomly selected from each grade.
Using the simple random sample of AGS students, each student had to name
either five celebrities or five politicians. The first 15 randomly selected students were
shown pictures of Jessica Alba, Hayden Panetierre, John Stamos, Liam Payne, and Blake
Lively (this was the celebrity group). While the next 15 randomly selected students were
shown pictures of John McCain, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Wendy Davis, and Al Gore
(this was the politician group). The number of people the students recognized out of the
five total they saw was recorded. Then, once all of the data was collected, the average
number of celebrities that were recognized was .5867 and the average number of
politicians recognized was .3567.
A two-sample hypothesis test for means should be used because we want to
determine if the true population mean percentage of pictures of politicians that AGS
students recognize is greater than the true population mean percentage of pictures of
celebrities that AGS students recognize. With conditions and assumptions verified, the pvalue that can be found using this hypothesis test is .9809. A significance level of .05
should be used because this is not a life or death situation. Since this p-value is much
greater than the alpha level of .05 we fail to reject the claim that the true population mean
percentage of pictures of politicians that AGS students recognize is greater than the true
population mean percentage of pictures of celebrities that AGS students recognize.
Therefore, we do not have evidence to support the claim that AGS students recognize
politicians more than celebrities.

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My hypothesis was correct when I predicted that AGS students would recognize
celebrities more than they recognized politicians. This is true because pop culture is such
a big part of all teenagers lives and it is hard to stay away from it even if they wanted to.
As a teenager, I will admit that I enjoy paying attention to celebrities lives more than
politicians and as my conclusion proved, AGS students feel the same way.

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Works Cited

Moraski, Lauren. Convention star power: Blurring the line between celebrity and
politics. CBS News. Web. 27 August, 2012.