Hypothesis:
If a city has a high community crime rate (significantly more than nation's average), a large minority population, and those crimes are violent, then the cities' schools will have lower California Standardized Test scores.
My dependent will be cities with low violent crime rates, and their CST scores.
My independent variable will be high violent crime rate and the population there.
My control will be the CST and the year of those scores versus the crime rates of that year.
This relates to my essential question because it show the connection between education and the possible cases of post-traumatic stress disorder that have gone undiagnosed. I chose to aim it at children because they are more susceptible to PTSD, if exposed to a violent or life threatening situation.
Since this experiment is solely based on previous research my equipment will consist on online databases from the FBI and the Bureau of Justice. I am going to collect data about different cities, and categorize them based on their violent crime rates. Then, I will put them into subgroups based on their demographics. From there, I can proceed by looking at their test scores. I am aware that population changes throughout the years, so I will be looking at that again later while looking at the scores. Right now, my goal is to gather information of about 20 cities, but I'll see how that works as I do this.
This will be under the Behavioral/Social Science category.
