Introduction As someone who has always done well in school and who has always been supported by my parents, I have sometimes wondered whether the continued absence of an authoritative figure at home influences how students behave at school. Without authority, discipline, or encouragement, would high school students slow down or fall behind in their studies? My ultimate goal is to test and analyze a survey conducted at my high school to see if there is indeed a relationship between the absence of a respected adult and my peers' grade point averages. Task Statement The main purpose of this investigation is to see if an authority figure at home affects high school students' grade point averages. This information or data for this survey is to be collected from the general population of Park High School in Cottage Grove, Minnesota via an online survey. Since all students have access to school-issued iPads, it is convenient to take advantage of an online survey and post the link on the whiteboards in all of my classrooms. Because some classes are populated by all four years of high school, I can apply this survey to a variety of student populations. In the survey, students are asked how many hours in a five-day school week they are left at home without a respected authority and what their grade point average is. The main reason for this analysis is simply personal curiosity about the home environment and its effect on high school grades; Whether the investigation shows that these two factors are independent or that they are dependent on each other, the result will only increase my curiosity about this topic. Investigation planI am "investigating" the relationship between the hours spent at home alone..... . half of the paper... there were less than five and this certainly damaged the validity of the test. Conclusion Limitations and all, it concludes with the χ^2 value of 13.58 that the null hypothesis must be accepted. As stated, the number of hours students spend at home without an authority figure is independent of the students' GPA. This is exactly what I predicted after using the Pearson correlation equation and receiving a number significantly lower than the desired value of one or close to one. So, as predicted throughout the survey, the number of hours spent without an authority figure at home does not affect high school students' grades; there is no correlation, so my original hypothesis was wrong. Works Cited “GPA Conversion Chart.” Princetonreview.com. Np, nd Web. May 22, 2014."Chi-Square Table." Docstoc.com. Np, 10 July 2010. Web. 22 May 2014.