Roles of Variables
In 2009, Stephens, Atkins & Kingston reported that participants tolerated more pain when shouting swear words than neutral words.
The amount of pain is the _______ variable.
What is dependent?
The middle score of an ordered distribution is the _______.
What is the median?
A study proposes that alcohol consumption is higher for students at a state university than for students at a religious college.
This is a ________ (correlational/within groups experimental/between groups experimental) research design?
What is a between groups experimental design?
The sum of squares is symbolized as __________.
What is SS?
When you read your textbooks, you may sometimes find errors in them. If you track the number of errors based on the edition of the textbook, you might find that 1st editions have more errors than 3rd, 5th, and 10th editions.
The number of errors found is a _____ variable.
a. categorical and discrete
b. categorical and continuous
c. scale and discrete
d. scale and continuous
What is a scale and discrete variable?
Liguori & Robinson (2001) reported that reaction time in a driving simulation was increased by even moderate alcohol consumption.
Reaction time is a _____ variable.
a. dependent
b. independent
c. confounding
What is a dependent variable?
Katrina observes and records the number of people who purchase a meal at the school cafeteria during each operating hour. The cafeteria is open from 6:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. and students typically eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner there.
What type of distribution should Katrina expect to see in her data.
a. rectangular
b. unimodal
c. bimodal
d. trimodal
What is trimodal?
Scharf et al., (2013) found that drinking reduced fat milk (1% or skim) was associated with greater obesity at age 2.
What is a (correlational/within groups experimental/between groups experimental) design?
What is a correlational design?
We _____ when calculating the average of deviations from the mean, because the sum of all deviation scores around the mean equals zero.
a. take the absolute value of the deviation scores
b. take the square root
c. divide by N
d. square the deviation scores
In a student election, five people run for student body president. The votes are tallied to create a list of candidates from most to least popular. The number of votes is then removed so that the candidates are only presented from most to least popular.
Popularity is a _____ variable.
a. categorical and discrete
b. categorical and continuous
c. scale and discrete
d. scale and continuous
What is a - categorical and discrete?
When you read your textbooks, you may sometimes find errors in them. If you track the number of errors based on the edition of the textbook, you might find that 1st editions have more errors than 3rd, 5th, and 10th editions.
The edition is a _____ variable.
a. dependent
b. independent
c. confounding
What is b - independent?
The measure of central tendency most likely to be distorted by outliers is the _______.
What is the mean?
In evaluating the effectiveness of different study strategies, the number of correct answers was higher when students were asked to read a passage and generate and answer questions about a passage than when they were simply asked to read the passage twice (Weinstein, McDermott & Roediger, 2010).
What is a (correlational/within groups experimental/between groups experimental) design?
What is a between groups experimental design?
A standard deviation is equal to 5.50. This number means that the numbers in the sample deviate, on the average:
a. 2.75 units from the mean.
b. 5.50 units from each other.
c. 5.50 units from the mean.
d. 30.25 (=5.502) units from the mean.
What is c - 5.50 units from the mean?
The united states department of homeland security threat advisory system measures threat as severe, high, elevated, guarded, or low.
Threat is a _____ variable.
a. categorical and discrete
b. categorical and continuous
c. scale and discrete
d. scale and continuous
What is categorical and discrete?
To determine whether Statistics: It Will Change Your Life or Statistics: Bigger, Better, Stronger would be a better book for students, a researcher assigned one textbook to a section taught at 10 am on MWF, and the other text to a section taught at 7 pm on Wednesday. Students to whom Statistics: Bigger, Better, Stronger was assigned performed better.
Time of day is a _____ variable.
a. dependent
b. independent
c. confounding
What is a confounding variable?
Most students struggled on Professor Horrible's dastardly difficult statistics exam, but several students had extremely high scores, creating positive skew, as a result the class mean will be _____ the median.
a. equal to
b. less than
c. smaller than
d. greater than
What is d - greater than?
Adolescents who experienced greater video game violence were more hostile and had more arguments with teachers (Gentile, Lynch, Linder, &Walsh, 2004).
What is a (correlational/within groups experimental/between groups experimental) design?
What is a correlational design?
If the standard deviation of some data is 4.19, what is the range?
a. 0.93
b. 8.38
c. 4.192
d. impossible to calculate with the information given
What is d - impossible to calculate with the information given?
Liguori & Robinson (2001) reported that reaction time in a driving simulation was increased by even moderate alcohol consumption.
Reaction time is a _____ variable.
a. categorical and discrete
b. categorical and continuous
c. scale and discrete
d. scale and continuous
What is d - scale and continuous?
A(n) _______ variable makes it impossible to determine whether the independent variable is the cause of changes in the dependent variable.
confounding
It is easier to distort and lie with the mean than with the median.
What is true?
Each participant experiences all levels of the independent variable in a(n) _______ design.
What is within groups?
Variance is the average of deviations around the mean expressed in _____ units.
What is squared?
_____ variables are almost always continuous.
What is scale?