Solution Manual For Fundamental Statistics For The Behavioral Sciences 9th Edition David C Howell
Solution Manual For Fundamental Statistics For The Behavioral Sciences 9th Edition David C Howell
Solution Manual For Fundamental Statistics For The Behavioral Sciences 9th Edition David C Howell
It is always important to take a moment to think about the type of data you are
using and what descriptive statistics will be most useful given the type. For continuous
or measurement data, you typically report measures of central tendency and measures of
variability. For categorical data (i.e., nominal data) you typically report the frequency of
each value. Though you don’t typically report the frequencies for continuous data, it is
often useful to observe the frequency distributions or histograms of continuous
distributions to note if they are normal or skewed.
Descriptive Statistics
Let’s begin by calculating descriptive statistics for the data in Appendix D which
can be found on the web as appendix.dav. (In some editions of these books the file is
referred to as “Appendix Data Set” or as Add.dat or as ADD.dat.) In this data set, I think
of ADD symptoms, IQ score, English grade, and GPA as continuous variables. We’ll
calculate measures of central tendency and variability for each of these.
Open appendixd.sav.
In the Analyze menu, select Descriptive Statistics and then Descriptives.
Select each of the continuous variables
by either double clicking them, which
automatically puts them in the Variable
list, highlight them one at a time by
single clicking them and then clicking
the arrow to shift them into the variable
list, or by holding the control key down
while highlighting all of the variables of
interest and then shifting them into the
variable list all at once by clicking the
arrow. Then click Options.
In the main descriptives dialog box, check the box that says Save standardized
values as variables. SPSS will calculate z scores for each of the variables using the
formula you learned about and append them to the end of your data file. Click Ok.
The resulting output will look like this. Note that the variable labels are used rather
than the variable names. Remember, we specified this as the default in
Edit/Options/Output Labels.
Double click the table so you can edit it. As was the case with graphs, SPSS has many
options to edit statistics in tables as well. Let’s try some of them.
Under Pivot, select Transpose Rows and Columns. Which orientation do you
prefer? I like the first since it’s more conventional, so I will Transpose the Rows and
Columns again to return to the original orientation.
Now, click on Format/Table properties. Take a moment to view all of the options in
this dialog box. “General” allows you to specify the width of row and column labels.
“Footnotes” allows you to chose numeric or alphabetic labels and subscript or
superscript as the position for those labels. “Cell formats” allows you to change the
font style and size, color, and the alignment. “Borders” allows you to add or remove
borders around rows, columns, and even cells. “Printing” allows you to select options
such as rescaling tables to fit on paper. After you’ve viewed the options, hit Cancel.
Now, click on Window/SPSS Statistics Data Editor and look at the standardized
values (z scores) SPSS added to your file. A brief portion of the Data Editor appears
below. You can see that SPSS named each variable with a z. SPSS also labeled the
new variables. Check this out in Variable View.
Frequencies
Now, we’ll use the frequencies command to help us examine the distributions of
the same continuous variables.
Histogram
Take a moment to review the output. It looks like ADD is somewhat normally
distributed, though a bit negatively skewed. Looking at your own output, are the other
variables normally distributed? I also remember now that English grade is nominal too.
Variables were scored as A, B, C, D, and F, though coded as 1 - 4. As noted in the text,
we could analyze this as continuous data, but it seems that reporting the frequencies
rather than measures of central tendency and dispersion may be more appropriate for this
variable.
As before, you can edit the tables or the graphs by double clicking on them. One
difference we have seen between the Descriptives and Frequencies options is that
descriptives only include mean for measures of central tendency whereas Frequencies
include the mean, median, and mode. Further, Descriptives does not have any built in
graphing options, but Frequencies does.
This time, put gender, level of English class, English grade, repeated a grade, social
problems, and drop out status in the variable list. Select Display frequency table.
Since there is a finite number of values, we want to know how many people fit in
every category. Click on Statistics and unselect all of the options because we decided
that measures of central tendency and variability are not useful for these data. Then
click Continue. Next, click on Charts. Click on Bar chart and select Percentages
as the Chart Values. Click Continue and then Ok. A sample of the resulting output is
below. Take a moment to review it.
Notice that the frequency tables include a column labeled Percent and another
labeled Valid percent. This is an important distinction when you have missing cases.
The percent column indicates the percent of cases in each category out of those cases for
which there is complete data on the variable. Valid percent indicates the percent of cases
in each category out of the total number of cases, even if some data are missing. For
example, imagine a sample of 100 students. Fifty cases are women, 40 are men, and 10
are missing the data. The percent of men would be 44.4%, but the valid percent of men
would be 40%. Which do you believe is the more accurate way to describe the sample?
I’d argue the valid percent. Now let’s move on to a more complicated type of frequency
table.
Crosstabs
Sometimes we need to know the number and percent of cases that fall in multiple
categories. This is useful when we have multiple categorical variables in a data set. For
example, in the data set we have been using, I’d like to know what percent of dropout and
nondropout students had social problems. We’ll use crosstabs to calculate this.
Compare Means
Now, let’s consider a case where we want to describe a continuous variable but at
different levels of a categorical variable. This is often necessary when you are comparing
group means. For example, we can compare ADD symptoms for males and females.
Let’s try it together.
Let’s try another more complicated example. This time, let’s calculate descriptive
statistics for ADD symptoms broken down by gender and whether or not a child had
social problems.
Notice that this table gives you the marginal descriptives (i.e., the descriptive for
gender independent of social problems and vice versa) under totals and the cell
descriptives (i.e., the descriptives at each level of the variables-e.g., for boys with social
problems).
Exit SPSS. There is no need to save the Data File since we haven’t changed it. It is up
to you to decide whether or not you would like to save the output file for future
reference.
Exercise
1. Using merge1.sav calculate the mean, median, mode, range, variance, and
standard deviation for the following variables: self-esteem, anxiety, coping, and
health. Create a histogram for anxiety. Note how you did each.
2. Using the data in appendixd.sav, calculate the frequency and percent of females
and males who did and did not have social problems.
3. Using the data in appendixd.sav, calculate the mean, variance, and standard
deviation for GPA broken down by social problems and drop out status.