Cellular Phones and their integration into Society

I took a look into who exactly was using cell phones by collecting field observations at various places within the University of Denver campus. As is suggested, I simply took a tally of each female and male student that walked by in use of a cell phone. My initial observations were held in the general vicinity outside of the library at 11:20 to 12:00 on the 10th of September, 2014. My second set of quantitative data was collected around Nagel and Nelson Halls later that same day, from 4:00 until 4:20 to be exact.

What I observed was truly astonishing. In my initial observations I recorded 116 females using their cellular devices while only 41 guys were using theirs. Let me specify that use of cellular devices includes texting, calling, listening to music and any other form of usage. I also observed, though no recordings were taken, that there was approximately even distribution of males and females around the library. This is also backed up by the near even enrollment by gender at the university. This means that approximately the same amount of females and males walked by in total meaning the sample sizes were approximately equal. I would also like to point out that this was a random sample as the students were not chosen in any way, and thus should portray accurately the entire student body.

Strikingly, later that day I recorded 59 females in use of cell phones in comparison to only 28 guys. I later added the two sets of data together and found out that 175 of the 244 people using cellular devices were females, accounting for 71.7%. In contrast, only 28.3% of the cellular phones users were males. There seemed to be a clear-cut social pattern but I took it a step further to reassure myself. I ran a Chi-Square Test on the set of data and calculated that this would happen less than .01% of the time if there was supposed to be an even distribution of cellular phone users by gender. Thus, it was confirmed! A social pattern had been identified. Females use their cellular devices significantly more often than males. Count Percentage Women 175 71.7% Men 69 28.3% Total 244 100%

I then asked myself “why is that?” What factors were contributing to the fact that girls use their cell phones more often? After thoroughly pondering all of the possible causes, I came to the conclusion that girls are more social individuals and simply have an innate desire to communicate more than guys do. I am speculating that this has to do with different hormonal levels within the bodies of males and females. Societal factors may also play a role on this social pattern. Possibly, girls are forced to be more social in order to be accepted into cliques, think Mean Girls, and have to converse frequently to maintain their image and reassure to themselves their self-worth. It makes sense that because girls seem to gossip more that they need to be more careful about their image to avoid getting a bad reputation. I do not think the case is that guys interact more on a personal level after my observations but this could be argued to be an alternate theory to my findings. A further test I’d like to run to is the amount of characters sent through Facebook messaging by males and females to see which gender is more social online. My educated guess would be that girls text more characters a day than guys, giving further evidence to the fact that girls are the social butterflies of the world.