Variables/Constants
A characteristic that can take on different values across people, places, or cases is called what?
What is a variable?
The person, group, organization, or other entity being studied is called what?
What is the unit of analysis?
The variable expected to influence or explain another variable is called what?
What is the independent variable?
Which requirement for causality means the presumed cause must occur before the effect?
What is temporal order?
Race/ethnicity, offense type, and political affiliation are typically measured at what level?
What is nominal?
A characteristic that does not change within a particular study is called what?
What is a constant?
A study examines attitudes of 300 high-school students toward school police. What is the unit of analysis?
What are individual high-school students?
The outcome a researcher is trying to explain is called what?
What is the dependent variable?
Which requirement for causality means the two variables must actually be related?
What is an empirical relationship?
Responses such as strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree are typically what level of measurement?
What is ordinal?
A researcher records students’ ages, GPAs, and class standing. Which of these are variables?
What are age, GPA, and class standing?
A researcher compares violent-crime rates across 50 cities. What is the unit of analysis?
What are cities?
A researcher asks whether hours studied affect exam scores. Identify the IV and DV.
What are hours studied as the IV and exam score as the DV?
Which requirement for causality means the relationship cannot be explained by some third variable?
What is nonspuriousness?
Temperature measured in Fahrenheit is typically what level of measurement?
What is interval?
A study includes only students enrolled in the same statistics course. “Enrollment in this statistics course” functions as what within the sample?
What is a constant?
A researcher compares disciplinary policies across 25 school districts. What is the unit of analysis?
What are school districts?
A researcher examines whether police training affects officer confidence when interacting with youth. Identify the IV and DV.
What are training as the IV and officer confidence as the DV?
Students in a mentoring program have fewer arrests, but students with greater parental supervision are also more likely to join the program. What problem might parental supervision create?
What is a spurious relationship or omitted-variable bias?
Age, income, number of arrests, and number of children are typically what level of measurement?
What is ratio?
A researcher studies 150 police officers and records years of experience, rank, and stress level. Identify three variables in the study.
What are years of experience, rank, and stress level?
A study uses data from individual officers but makes conclusions about entire police departments. What should researchers be careful about?
What is confusing the unit of analysis or making conclusions at a different level than the data support?
A study asks whether occupational stress predicts the quality of officer-youth interactions. Identify the IV and DV and explain why.
What are occupational stress as the IV and quality of officer-youth interactions as the DV, because stress is being used to explain variation in interaction quality?
A researcher finds that neighborhoods with more police officers also have more reported crime and concludes that police presence causes crime. Why is that causal claim questionable?
What is the possibility that crime levels influence police deployment or that other variables explain both, meaning temporal order and/or nonspuriousness have not been established?
A student rates satisfaction from 1 = very dissatisfied to 5 = very satisfied. Another student has a score of 4 while another has a score of 2. Can we say the first student is “twice as satisfied”? Why or why not?
What is no, because the variable is ordinal; the categories are ordered, but the numerical distances and ratios are not necessarily meaningful?