Assignment 4
Find two peer-reviewed articles that provide examples of quantitative studies relevant to your research topic. These do not have to be exact to your topic or use data from the General Social Survey. These articles will form your literature review for your final project, although an abbreviated version in comparison to what you would use in a “real-life” research project. In these instances, it would be expected of you to exhaust as much of the existing literature as you could as you build context for your own research.
Explain their findings based on the statistical data they present. Answer the following questions:
1. What test of significance did the researchers use? This can usually be found in a discussions section or reviewed in the methods section of a research article.
2. What were their findings? These will be reviewed with detail in the discussion and findings sections.
3. What was their research question and what were their findings with regards to their statistics?
Assignment 5
Measures of association tell us the strength of a possible relationship between two variables. This week you will discover the strength of association between your chosen variables as well as how to interpret the findings using SPSS functions and tests such as lambda, gamma, and Person’s r along with other possible tests. Remember that these tests are specific to the level of measurement that your variables are. In other words, one test may not work in a different relationship test.
Be sure to test the strength of association and include this in your overall analysis.
Assignment 6
So far you have read about and practiced various tests of significance. These tests work in two ways:
1. They allow us to see if our relationship is “statistically significant”. (Remember that this only shows us that there is or is not a relationship but does NOT show us if it is big, small, or in-between.)
2. It lets us know if our findings can be generalized to the population which our sample was selected from and represents.
This week you will decide which test of significance you will use for your project. For this class your choices for tests will include one of the following:
• Chi-square
• t Test
• ANOVA
We will be using a process for hypothesis testing which outlines five steps researchers can follow to complete this process:
1. Write your research hypothesis (H1) and your null hypothesis (H0).
2. Identify and record your level of significance. These are usually .05 or .01.
3. Complete the test using SPSS.
4. Identify the number under Sig. (2-tail). This will be represented by “p”.
5. Compare the numbers in steps 2 and 4 and apply the following rule:
1. If p < or = level of significance, than you reject the null hypothesis
6. Determine what to do with your null and explain this to your reader. Be sure to go beyond the phrase “reject or fail to reject the null” and explain how that impacts your research and best describes the relationship between variables.
