Assignment

Provide answers to the questions below:

I. Although the mean is used most often as a measure of central tendency, when might someone prefer mode over mean or median? When is the median preferred over the mean to describe a variable?

(Note: Be sure to specify when to use mean vs. median vs. mode based on the type of measure (categorical vs. interval, type of distribution).

II. What are some ways in which measures of central tendency can inadvertently lead to bad decisions? Refer to the example Canvassing for Donations to show how this can occur. What are some circumstances that are particularly likely to be problematic?

(Hint: the shape of the distribution is important)?

Discuss Purpose of the discussion: When you conduct your dissertation, you will compile a large amount of information. This info will need to be assembled, processed, simplified, clarified, and shared in order to bring out its true value-in a word, reduced (often referred to as data reduction).Your data analysis will use statistical procedures (tools) to reduce the amount of detail in the data and summarize it, and make the most important facts and relationships apparent.

Before you can analyze data you must prepare it and organize the data so it can be processed. While one could hand tabulate findings, it is far more efficient to use statistical software to display results and calculate appropriate statistical analysis. This is where SPSS comes in! Even though software helps greatly to simplify the processes of computing calculations and tabulations, you will be the one to analyze and interpret the findings.

This discussion is focused on getting you up and running in SPSS. First, make sure you have installed SPSS and are able to open it.

Task:

Poll 5 other people and ask the following questions. Write down the answers as you will need to enter these in SPSS after you have the data file set up:

Question A. What are the last four digits of your phone number?
Question B. Do you exercise regularly? (Yes or No)
Question C. How many hours a week would you say you exercise?
Question D. Do you participate in team sports? (Yes or No)
Question E. What is your favorite sport to play?