CASE STUDY A February 5, 2015, article in Inside Higher Education reported that college students today are spending less time socializing face-to-face and more time socializing via social media. What was the basis for this finding?

Every year since 1985, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has conducted a survey of college freshmen. The 2014 survey involved a random sample of 153,015 of the more than 1.6 million first-time, full-time freshmen students at 227 of the nation’s baccalaureate colleges and universities. An interesting finding of the 2014 survey was that the percentage of students who reported spending six or more hours per week interacting in online social networks was 27.2%. This represented a slight increase from 26.9% in 2013. At the same time, students reported spending less time socializing with friends in person. In 2014, 18% of students (an all-time low) reported spending at least 16 hours per week socializing with friends. This was down from 2013 when 20.1% of students reported spending this same amount of time per week socializing with friends. Further, in 2014, 38.8% of students (an all-time high) reported dedicating five hours per week or less to socializing; in 2013, this figure was 36.3%.

The Inside Higher Education article included a quote from the current director of a foundation that works to prevent suicide among students. He noted that time spent on social media is replacing time spent hanging out in person with friends, but even though the ways students are interacting is different, they are still finding ways to connect with each other.

The sample size in the 2013 survey was 165,743, so the findings reported come from two very large samples. Although different percentages were reported in 2013 and 2014, changes in the percentages are small. Could it be that the difference between the two samples is just due to the luck of the draw in randomly choosing the respondents?

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In this chapter, we discuss methods, called tests of significance, that help us decide whether an observed difference can plausibly be attributed to chance. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to interpret such tests and whether the differences in the Higher Education Research Institute’s surveys of college freshmen can be plausibly attributed to chance.