Levels of Measurement
A survey question asks: What is your favorite restaurant in Portland? And then it provides a list of all of the current restaurants to choose from.
What is the level of measurement for this variable?
Nominal
Mode and Median
Any statistical analysis test that returns a p value above this amount is not statistically significant.
.05
In what column of SPSS would you find the wording of the question/description of the variable?
Label
In the following question, what is the dependent variable?
Are cohabitating couples more likely to have successful marriages than couples who don't live together before marriage?
marriage succes
There is a variable in the GSS that measures whether or not respondents think life is meaningful only if you provide meaning. The answer categories are:
Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither agree nor disagree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree.
This is an example of what level of measurement?
Ordinal
In a small study about workplace experiences, a researcher is curious about the length of commuting workers do and asks how many miles respondents commute to work.
They receive the following answers. What is the range of these answers?
1, 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 25
24
(25-1)
What test do you run to test the null hypothesis and populate the p value for two ordinal variables?
chi square
You're analyzing political views and see that the answer categories include "extremely left, left, somewhat left, independent/neither, somewhat right, right, and extremely right" but you want to condense the categories to be left, independent, and right.
What do you do in SPSS to make that adjustment?
Recode (into a different variable)
In a research study, you are curious whether or not gender and sexuality have an influence on what major people choose. In this example, major selection is an example of an independent or dependent variable?
dependent variable
This level of measurement is one that has categories and the order of the answer categories matter but the distance between answer categories does not need to be consistent.
Ordinal Variable
A measurement that is used to see where a single person falls in the distribution of a dataset is called what?
z score
You populate a t-test and see that your p value is .03.
Is there a significant relationship? And at what level?
Yes, at the p<.05 level.
In SPSS, we note answers like "don't know" or "inapplicable" or "not answered" that we don't want to count in the analysis by including them as _________ values.
missing
You want to know whether or not race is an influential factor in recorded stress levels. In this example, what is your independent variable?
race
The variable, EXERHRS, measures how many hours participants exercised in the past week. Participants could enter the exact number of hours they exercised into the online survey.
What is the level of measurement of EXERHRS?
interval-ratio
You calculate the variance of test scores as 100.
What is the standard deviation?
10
If you get a p value of .08, what can you say about your null hypothesis?
we fail to reject the null hypothesis
Where do you look to determine the level of measurement in an SPSS dataset?
Look at the values listed for the variable
A research study aims to establish if eating breakfast in the morning makes an individual more likely to perform better in school.
In this example which variable is the dependent variable and which one is the independent variable?
DV: School Performance;
IV: Eating Breakfast
What kind of variable can technically be measured as a nominal, ordinal, or interval-ratio variable?
Dichotomous variables
In a research study, a variable measures frequency of eating at restaurants and by asking "how many times a month do you go out to eat?"
In a normal distribution, 68.2% of the answers fell between _____ and _____.
3.1 and 5.3
(one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean)
If you get a p value of .001, what can you say about your null hypothesis?
we are able to reject the null hypothesis
(at the p<.001 level)
You populate a frequency table in SPSS. When reporting the percentage of answers for your variable, do you report out the:
percent, valid percent, or cumulative percent?
valid percent
When plugging in your independent and dependent variables to a crosstab before running a chi square, which variable goes in the "rows" section and which variable goes in the "columns" section?
Your dependent variable goes in the rows section and your independent variable goes in the columns section.