Aidan Waterman

Course: Introduction to Statistical Methods
Professor: Janice Stencil
Assignment Title: Have movies gotten longer?

Assignment Details

My topic of choice for my statistical research study was the run time (in minutes) of movies from 2022 and movies from 2002, and whether movies have gotten longer, shorter, or stayed the same over the 20-year time span.

I randomly selected 37 films made in 2002 and 37 films made in 2022.

I created stem-and-leaf plots and box-and-whisker plots for both years.  The distribution of the 2002 movie run times looks very symmetrical. The distribution of the 2022 movie run times looks like it is skewed right.

After that, I did a statistical analysis of the data from the two years. I discovered three outliers, two in the 2002 data set and one in the 2022 data set.

I did hypothesis testing in order to test my claim that the average run time of movies made in 2022 is larger than the average run time of movies in 2002.

Application

The topic of my assignment connects to my life because I am considering going into filmmaking or video production as a career. This assignment gave me additional insight into an intriguing trend toward longer movie lengths. Now that I know of this trend, I may wind up researching why this is the case to inform decisions in future videos I make.

It also connects to a course I am taking because the course is related to filmmaking.

Results/Conclusions

I used a two-sample Student’s t-test. The standardized test statistic t is 2.88 and the P-value is 0.0027.

Based on my samples, at the 1% level of significance, there is enough evidence to support my claim that the average run time of movies made in 2022 is larger than the average run time of movies in 2002.

The assignment helped me better understand how much time it takes to complete a statistics study.

Challenges and Successes

I am most proud of my hypothesis testing because it took a significant amount of work to learn how to test hypotheses. This was because hypothesis testing is a complicated subject to grasp at the start.  

I am also proud of the study itself because it was a unique thing to test.