You are a professor of statistics and have been asked to teach acourse in social science statistics off-campus to a class of gradstudents enrolled in the Continuing Education Program of theUniversity. Since you’ve never taught this program before, youdon’t know a great deal about the needs and background of thestudents in the class. In order to learn more, you hand out asurvey to each student asking for information on the followingvariables: age, undergraduate field, number of stats courses taken,and the level of interest in conducting research (coded as low,medium, high). The results are below:
Student # | Age | Major | Statistics Courses | Research Interest |
1 | 24 | Poli Sci | 3 | High |
2 | 55 | Zoology | 3 | High |
3 | 26 | Botany | 0 | Low |
4 | 55 | Sociology | 0 | Low |
5 | 22 | Poli Sci | 1 | Low |
6 | 23 | Sociology | 2 | Medium |
7 | 24 | Poli Sci | 2 | Medium |
8 | 55 | Forestry | 1 | Low |
9 | 56 | Engineering | 9 | High |
10 | 53 | Poli Sci | 1 | Medium |
11 | 26 | Chemistry | 2 | Medium |
12 | 24 | Sociology | 0 | Low |
13 | 54 | Physics | 3 | High |
14 | 51 | Sociology | 3 | High |
15 | 55 | Poli Sci | 0 | Low |
Analyze your data to give you some useful information about theclass. In doing so you need to answer a few things: the level ofmeasurement of the variables, meaningful measures of centraltendency for each variable (there can be more than one), thecalculated measure of central tendency for each variable (there canbe more than one). In order to do that, populate the followingtable:
Variable | Level of Measurement | Meaningful Measures of Central Tendency (there can bemultiple) | Central Tendency Values (there can bemultiple) |
Age | | | |
Major | | | |
Statistics Courses | | | |
Research | | | |
Based on the data you collected, calculate the measures ofdispersion (specifically the range, variance and standarddeviation) for each of the variables that are at theinterval level of measurement.
Since all of your data, your measures of central tendency andmeasures of dispersion. brief paragraph explaining the results ofyour survey paying special attention to what you, as theinstructor, would find useful to bear in mind as you conduct theclass. Address each variable, meaningful measures of centraltendency for each (providing brief mention as to why you thinkwhich are the most useful), and measures of dispersion (whereappropriate). You can include graphical representations of the datawhere it would help to defend the answer.
