Creating Consultants in Introductory Statistics: Utilizing Facebook Data

Abstract

Facebook is something that every student in an introductory statistics course is familiar with, and thus a great platform to build a project. This poster will outline a semester-long project that puts students in the role of consultants, to a local organization, on how users are interacting with their Facebook page. The project involves students in every aspect of statistical analysis, from identifying relevant data and forming research questions, to deploying hypothesis tests and writing their findings up for a general audience. Facebook let's organizations easily download data describing their page use and is an excellent way to get real, relevant, current data into the course. This project is an excellent opportunity to discuss the difference between observational and experimental data and think about what that difference means for the scope of the inference. My class's partnership with the dog adoption group Deaf Dogs Rock got them really invested in the project and motivated them to take extra care in their final reports.

Materials

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