This papers consists of three exercises in an elementary statistics in criminal justice course. The first exercise asks the author to explain how to learn a new statistical test and applies that knowledge to Spearman's Rank Order Coefficient. The next exercise is linked to an excel file and uses the slope, intercept, and r-square excel functions. The final exercise uses the same functions and also works backwards from an excel output sheet to create an equation for multiple variables.
¶ … Anthony Brennan
I think that your response provides a good example of how to pick the appropriate statistical test for assessing data in a given set, which is, in my opinion, the more likely scenario that we might encounter once working in the field. However, the hypothetical question not only said that we were provided with a data set, but also told which test we would need to use. Your response suggests that you had the same misgivings about this question that I had, because the test provided might not be the appropriate test for the data given or for the results that are being sought. I think that reading about the test in order to see what type of relationship between variables the test was used to explore would be a great beginning way of determining whether the test was appropriate and how the supervisor expected one to use the test in that manner. I liked your use of the example of the Chi-square test, but felt as if you could have explained that it helps examine results to see if they are random, as predicted, or if the results are somehow skewed. To me, skewed results suggests the intervention of another variable, which may not have existed in an original study, but that might be important.
Response to Joseph Seabolt
Like many of the other students who responded, I feel like you added an additional component to the question that was not included. You have answered the question as if the task was to determine whether or not the unfamiliar test you were told to use is the appropriate one for the data you are being asked to analyze. As I read the question, the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the test was not at issue; instead, the question was how would one familiarize oneself with an unfamiliar test. I think the distinction is an important one because, in a working situation, the test chosen by a superior has probably been chosen because of the type of results that test will yield. Therefore, understanding what type of results the test is going to yield would, in my opinion, help someone understand how to analyze the data and what the raw data means.
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