Instructions for Data Analysis and Writing of the Results Section
I. Data Set Instructions:
a. Click on the link for the Optimism data set and add your data to this data set by entering the 15 women participants’ data in the rows at the end of the women’s data and entering the 15 men participants’ data in the rows at the end of the men’s data. Therefore, you should have a total of 15 rows of data for women and 15 rows of data for men.
b. Conduct the following analyses on the data and discuss the results by answering the questions below in the results section of your paper (i.e. be sure to write in paragraph form for this section).
c. Analyses:
i. Calculate a Sum for each person in the study. This should result in a column at the end of the data that is a sum of all the scores in that row. The higher the sum, the more optimistic the person is. Sums = 30 is the highest level of optimism.
ii. Calculate a Mean, Median, Mode, and Standard Deviation for this Sum column for both men and women. This will tell you how optimistic women and men were as a group in the study. The higher the mean the higher the optimism. This should automatically populate.
iii. Create two polygons– one for the data for men and one for women and determine if the distributions are normal or skewed. If the polygon chart does not automatically populate you will have to manually type in your frequency.
iv. Look at the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation and describe how these measures of central tendency indicates whether the distribution of men and women are normal or skewed. That is, is the distribution of men and women normal or skewed? How does the mean, median, and mode scores indicate if the distribution is normal or skewed?
v. Look at the table of raw data for both men and women. Explain why the raw numbers indicate the distribution is normal or skewed. If the distributions are normal how would the scores have to change to yield a skewed distribution? If the distributions how would the scores have to change to yield a normal distribution.
vi. Include textbook content to assist with your answers above and be sure to include proper citation of the textbook in your results section. The textbook could be used as your third additional resource.
II. P Value and Optimism Study:
a. After all your data is in you will see your p-value for your independent t-test populate. Remember this independent t-test is used to analyze if the difference between two groups is statistically significant. This test is based off of the 15 females and 15 males. If you have trouble seeing the p-value populate you can always put in the formula into excel: =ttest(array 1, array 2, 2, 3). Note that for the array you would have to highlight the data values from the female and male category. This is a two-tail test and note that we are assuming normality. In your analysis you will state your null and alternative hypothesis and the decision based off of the p-value that was provided in the cell. We are testing this at a level of significance of 0.05.
