This study focuses on the potential correlation between the amount of time college students spend listening to music and their chosen major. I was curious to see if there was any relationship between these two variables, as different majors can affect lifestyle decisions and a student’s amount of free time. My theory was that students in the more work-intensive majors, like social or natural sciences, would listen to less music than the humanities major. I reason that the humanities majors typically have a slightly lighter workload, an idea I am basing solely on personal experience, and the fact that the field is more closely related to music and its cultural significance. The reasoning is not completely sound, as workloads can vary from class to class, but my overall goal was simply to see if each major was significantly different from the others. Any significant difference would be interesting to explore, as it may shed light on lifestyle changes that occur alongside studying a specific major.
I collected data using a survey that asked each participant to respond with their chosen major and the average amount of time they spend listening to music each day. There was also a question to ensure that all participants were at least 18 and are currently attending college. The survey was sent out to members of the statistics class and other college students in the same age group. Ideally, these participants would be randomly selected to ensure more reliable results, but the limitations of the project prevented that. I used major categories instead of each individual major to simplify the data collection and analysis. There are many different majors, and each institution has its own variation on similar fields of study, so the categories were meant to consolidate these differences into interpretable groups. Natural sciences capture a large portion of majors, like biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Social sciences represent another group, with majors including but not limited to political science, psychology, and economics. The last category was humanities, which includes majors that study different aspects of human culture like history, art, and philosophy. With these three groups, the survey should evenly distribute the different majors and provide interpretable data.
Results
My results were varied, with Humanities majors making up 40.7 percent of responses with 22 submissions, Social Science majors accounting for 38.9 percent of responses with 21 submissions, and Natural Science majors receiving 11 responses, which accounts for 20.4 percent of submissions. The average daily listening time for Humanities was 113.09 minutes, with a standard deviation of 54.44. For the Social Sciences, the average daily listening time was 147.38 minutes with a much larger standard deviation of 164.92. And lastly, Natural Science majors listened to an average of 90.91 daily minutes with a standard deviation of 50.39. Taking the means at face value seems to show that the Natural Science and Humanities majors listened to a similar amount of music, with Social Science majors listening to about 50% more music than the other two disciplines. However, after an analysis of variance, these differences did not turn out to be statistically significant. The results were F(2, 51)=1.046 p<.0.3588 which shows that the differences in results were most likely due to random chance. Had the p-value been less than 0.05 these results would have been statistically significant at the .05 level, but instead, they failed to reject the null hypothesis that major has no impact on daily listening time. Perhaps if I had received more natural science submissions the data would have been stronger, with each group approaching an equal number of submissions. Overall the data showed that major type has little influence over average daily listening time and that any discrepancy was most likely due to random chance.