Alternate title: LOL BLOG 666 OMG WERE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!11!!ONE!!!

Now that the formalities are over I’d like to get right to the point: I’ve finally decided on what I’m going to analyze with a two-sample t-test in regards to my blogs.

I shall compare my “happy” blogs to my “sad” blogs (both terms to be defined further down) on various constituents (also to be defined further down).

Are you all ready for this?!?!

Goal:
Compare “sad” blogs and “happy” blogs on four independent points: number of words, number of smilies, number of exclamation points (indicative of excitement, frustration, flabbergastment, emphasis), and number of words in italics and/or in all caps (indicative of essentially the same things as exclamation points, but slightly cooler).

Definitions:
~”Happy” blog: a blog in which the mood is set to something indicative of a happy mood or an excited mood (amused, thrilled, silly, relieved, geeky/nerdy/dorky, and, of course, happy*).
~”Sad” blog: a blog in which the mood is set to something indicative of sadness, frustration, or anger (pissed, peeved, depressed, melancholy, sad, frustrated, angry*).
~Number of words: number of words in the body of the blog. The title/headings and the comments are not counted in this total.
~Number of smilies: just what it sounds like. Smilies like “:)” or “:P” used in chat dialogues are not counted.
~Number of exclamation points: as in this: !, not the number of times I say “exclamation points.”
~Number of words in italics and/or in all caps: this or THIS or THIS all count.

Method:
1) Generate an SRS of equal size n for both the happy blog data and the sad blog data
2) Collect data from said SRS
3) Analyze it in SAS
4) Bore you all to death with the results

Formulas in SAS:
proc univariate (for all variables)
proc ttest  (for all variables, obviously the most important one if I’m doing t-tests!)

Procedure:
It was first figured that the population size was N = 665, as today’s blog was not counted amongst the viable samples. To determine an appropriate sample size for each category (happy and sad blogs), it was figured that a good n would amount to approximately 7% of the data. An n equal to 25 for both categories was used (thus having a total n = 50).
The blogs were numbered in a rather ingenious manner (thank you very much), and the SRS was obtained through sampling done with a random number table. If a blog obtained was deemed neither happy nor sad (indifferent blogs) it was disregarded and another random number was chosen in its place and sampling continued as normal.
Data was collected for both categories in all variables (see Raw Data) and was then analyzed using SAS. Results are displayed below in the Results section.

Raw data:

Data names: blogno; words; smilies; exclamations; italiccaps; happysad;
89 300 1 9 19 h
156 124 0 0 0 h
574 42 0 1 0 h
166 108 1 1 0 h
389 51 1 2 0 h
422 83 1 0 0 h
556 34 0 0 0 h
446 126 1 2 0 h
653 900 1 9 38 h
275 370 0 6 0 h
371 161 1 0 0 h
465 215 0 1 0 h
637 457 0 10 21 h
3 223 3 4 1 h
351 296 0 12 1 h
167 252 0 2 1 h
52 180 0 1 0 h
649 862 0 34 10 h
631 399 1 8 42 h
64 22 1 2 0 h
55 57 1 0 0 h
237 453 0 32 16 h
236 49 1 3 2 h
298 186 1 2 2 h
20 115 2 1 0 h
643 174 0 3 0 s
186 23 1 0 1 s
316 166 0 0 1 s
90 74 0 0 0 s
161 105 3 3 14 s
115 76 2 2 3 s
439 131 0 1 0 s
522 370 0 3 8 s
202 70 1 1 3 s
8 360 1 15 1 s
381 1258 0 18 38 s
468 128 0 0 2 s
12 59 0 0 0 s
41 21 0 0 0 s
474 174 1 0 0 s
425 459 0 0 0 s
265 236 0 2 1 s
311 64 1 0 0 s
363 5734 0 3 2 s
518 310 0 0 1 s
579 181 1 0 0 s
497 81 0 0 0 s
416 414 0 1 0 s
385 59 0 0 0 s

Results:
OH ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?! This is intense, people.
First up: the results of the univariate procedures for each variable. These data are for the whole sample, remember.

Words
Mean: 336.36 (standard deviation = 815.33)
Minimum: 21
Maximum: 5734

Smilies
Mean: 0.56 (standard deviation = 0.76)
Minimum: 0
Maximum: 3

Exclamation Points
Mean: 3.88 (standard deviation = 7.26)
Minimum: 0
Maximum: 34 (thirty-four exclamation points in a single blog? Good lord)

Italicized and/or All Caps Words
Mean: 4.56 (standard deviation =10.17)
Minimum: 0
Maximum: 42

Second: t-test results!

Words
Mean number of words in happy blogs: 242.6
Mean number of words in sad blogs: 430.12
Using –=.05, the results of the two-sample t-test showed that there was not a significant difference in the mean number of words in the two types of blogs. Though it sure looks like it from comparing the two, doesn’t it? That’s stats for ya.

Smilies
Mean number of smilies in a happy blog: 0.68
Mean number of smilies in a sad blog: 0.44
Sorry guys, this one isn’t showing a significant difference in the means, either. I guess I’m pretty constant with my particulars in my blogs, regardless of how I’m feeling.

Exclamation Points
Mean number of exclamation points in a happy blog: 5.68
Mean number of exclamation points in a sad blog: 2.08
Ooh, we were pretty close on this one! When I saw this result I was tempted to raise my alpha level to .1, thus making this one statistically significant, but then I figured that would be data manipulation, so I didn’t do it. Praise me!

Italicized and/or All Caps words
Mean number of italicized and/or words in all caps in a happy blog: 6.12
Mean number of italicized and/or words in all caps in a sad blog: 3
You guessed it—the means are not statistically significantly different. Strange, huh?

Now you may be thinking I did all this for nothing. Quite the contrary! We’ve learned from a sample of 50 blogs that, according to the data, my happy and sad blogs do not differ in a statistically significant manner on four key points. I find that interesting, myself.

As for you, well…you’re probably nodding off right now, so I’ll stop here.

*Does not encompass all moods used for defining the categories. I could have gone through and listed them all, but I’m too lazy for that.