Religion Essay, Research Paper

I give Professor Robert Smidt permission to use this project in class or for any other reason and I don’t mind if my name is used.

Project #1

Data Source: The data was taken from A.O.L. (American On Line) chat rooms on January 19, 1999 from around 6:00pm to around 7:00pm. The address on the World Wide Web is www.aol.com. The questionnaire was administered by myself and a classmate by asking a random person that was logged on at the time, “Can I ask you a few questions for a class I am in?” If they agreed, we would ask them their age/gender, and then the question “Are you a Christian?” The variable in question was if the person was a Christian (a person who believes and follows the teachings of Jesus Christ.) There was only two possible answers to the question, yes or no. There were 35 people interviewed.

Analysis:

Are you a

Christian?

YES (1) 23

NO (2) 12

Total: 35

The two graphs both show the results of the data from the experiment “Are you a Christian?” but in different ways. The relative frequency of the people that said yes to the question was 0.6571, and the relative frequency of the people who said no was 0.3428. That means that 65.71% of the people we interviewed where Christian and 34.28% were not.

The bar chart does a good job of enhancing the data so that the differences were seen, and it also had the option of labeling the axes to make the data more clear to the reader. A weakness of the bar chart was that the total number of people interviewed was not obvious, as was the case with the pie chart. The pie chart shows the responses as a part of the whole, but it doesn’t show the numbers corresponding to the percents. The pie chart also visually explains the majority of the people interviewed responded to item 1, which was yes, and about 1/3 responded with item 2, which was no. The pie chart was very useful for a quick interpretation of the data, which takes less time to interpret than the bar chart.

From the results of the data, I discovered that the majority of the people that chat online around dinnertime are Christians. I hope that the sample I interviewed was representative of most Americans, and that the majority of Americans that chat online with American Online are Christian as well. Making that inference, it can maybe be assumed that about 60% of the chatters on America Online at a given time are Christian, which reflects the population that owns computers, and have online service. To me this is good news because I know that about 60% of the people that I have a common interest with me (chatting online) and share the same belief as I do. This information could be useful to organizations desiring to reach the Christian public for all different kinds of purposes, from advertising to encouraging.

The results did surprise me because I had the impression that most of middle class America, especially young people, had turned away from religion, and the existence of God. This experiment reassured me that the group of people I consider myself to associate with still does believe in a higher being and does have faith in Jesus.