Statistics for the Social Sciences Test
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Course Introduction
Statistics for the Social Sciences introduces students to the fundamental concepts and methods of statistical analysis as applied within the social sciences. The course covers topics such as data collection, descriptive statistics, probability, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing, correlation, and regression analysis. Emphasis is placed on understanding how statistical techniques are used to analyze real-world social phenomena, interpret data, and draw meaningful conclusions. Students will also gain practical experience in applying statistical software to manage and analyze datasets relevant to fields like psychology, sociology, political science, and economics.
Recommended Textbook
Answering Questions With Statistics 1st Edition by Robert F. Szafran
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Page 2
Chapter 1: Introduction
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Sample Questions
Q1) A critic charges that IQ tests don't really measure what they claim to measure. They say they measure natural intelligence but they really measure knowledge of the dominant culture of a society. This critic is claiming IQ tests lack
A) authenticity
B) parsimony
C) reliability
D) validity
Answer: D
Q2) The variable "favorite color" (attributes: red, blue, yellow, other) has what level of measurement?
A) nominal
B) ordinal
C) interval/ratio
Answer: A
Q3) What is the difference between a census and a sample?
Answer: In a census every element in a population is measured whereas in a sample only some of the elements in a population are measured.
Q4) What are the three levels of measurement used in the text?
Answer: nominal, ordinal, and interval/ratio
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Chapter 2: Data Sets
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Sample Questions
Q1) Convert this number from scientific notation into normal notation: 7.89E+03
A) 7890
B) .00789
C) .00789
D) 7890
Answer: A
Q2) Which of the following SPSS procedures would show you how each variable was defined in Variable View?
A) Case Summaries
B) Display Data File Information
C) Frequencies
Multiple-Choice Questions from Student Quizzes
Answer: B
Q3) You are given a new SPSS data file created by someone else. What should you do to gain familiarity with its contents?
Answer: You should run Display Data File Information, study the results, and quickly scroll through Data View to get a sense of the data.
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Chapter 3: Frequency Tables and Univariate Charts
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Sample Questions
Q1) What kinds of questions are answered with cumulative percents from a frequency table?
Answer: depending on how the rows of the frequency table are ordered, questions about the percent of cases using the lower attributes, the higher attributes, the more commonly-used attributes, or the less commonly-used attributes
Q2) Which column in a frequency table should you use to find the actual number of cases that gave a particular answer?
A) frequency
B) percent
C) valid percent
D) cumulative percent
Answer: A
Q3) "A statistic which summarizes or draws conclusions about the values on one variable" is a definition of a(n)
A) descriptive statistic
B) inferential statistic
C) multivariate statistic
D) univariate statistic
Answer: D
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Chapter 4: Central Tendency and Dispersion
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Sample Questions
Q1) You want a measure of central tendency for an ordinal level variable. You want the measure that makes use of the fact that the attributes are not only different but also have rank order. What statistic would you calculate?
A) mean
B) median
C) range
D) standard deviation
Q2) What univariate statistics are usually used to describe the distribution of cases on an interval/ratio variable that is not badly skewed?
Q3) An interval/ratio variable has a variance of 100. What is the value of the standard deviation?
standard deviation = __________
Q4) Which of the following variables has the greatest dispersion?
A) variable A with a standard deviation of 3
B) variable B with a variance of 25
C) variable C with a variance of 1
D) variable D with a standard deviation of 6
Q5) What univariate statistics are usually used to describe the distribution of cases on a nominal variable?
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Chapter 5: Creating New Variables
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Sample Questions
Q1) Which of the following is correct about the order of arithmetic operations used by SPSS?
A) division is done before multiplication
B) multiplication is done before division
C) multiplication and division have equal priority
D) division is not permitted within SPSS
Q2) To collapse a variable with nine categories into a variable with just three categories while not losing any valid cases, you would use which SPSS procedure?
A) Compute
B) Recode
C) Select Cases
D) Split File
Q3) You want to Compute a new variable that multiplies a person's hourly wage by their hours worked per week by their weeks worked per year. Write out the numeric expression that would accomplish this. (Variables: hourlyWage, hoursPerWeek, weeksPerYear)
Q4) When would you use Select Cases and when would you use Split File?
Q5) Why would an analyst want to know the value of Cronbach's alpha?
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Chapter 6: Comparing Group Means
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Sample Questions
Q1) What is the lowest level of measurement permissible for the variable that is averaged for each group in the Means procedure?
A) nominal
B) ordinal
C) interval/ratio
Q2) Based on the following output, which group had the greatest variability in EDUC (years of schooling)?
A) 1980 GSS young adults
B) 1980 GSS middle-age adults
C) 2010 GSS young adults
D) 2010 GSS middle-age adults
Q3) You want to see the size and direction of the gender gap in education for each geographic region. Which SPSS procedure should you run?
A) Descriptives
B) Explore
C) Frequencies
D) Means
Q4) What does layering independent variables do?
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Chapter 7: Crosstab Tables
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Sample Questions
Q1) Answer the questions that follow this SPSS output:
Someone makes the claim that blacks are more likely than whites to believe in an afterlife. (POSTLIFE is belief in an afterlife.)
A) Does the information in this table support the claim? (yes or no)
B) Support your conclusion by citing relevant (and only relevant) information from the table.
Q2) Answer the questions that follow this SPSS output:
A) What percent of Catholics approve of women working? [Hint: you must calculate the answer.] __________
B) What percentage of all the respondents represented in the table are Catholics who disapprove of women working? [Hint: you must calculate the answer.] __________
C) If you wanted to assess the effect of the independent variable (RELIG) on the dependent variable (FEWORK), should you use row percents, column percents, or total percents? _______________
Q3) How can you use column percents to identify the median?
Q4) What kinds of questions can you answer using a crosstab table?
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Page 9
Chapter 8: Nominal and Ordinal Measures of Association
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Q1) For describing a relationship between two variables, what information does a measure of association provide that an examination of percents, medians, or modes in a crosstab does not?
Q2) Your hypothesis is that the taller a person is, the more self-confident he or she is. Height is an interval/ratio variable measured in inches; self-confidence is a five category ordinal variable with higher scores indicating greater self-confidence. The value of Somers' d is .68. Does this measure of association A) support the hypothesis B) contradict the hypothesis
Q3) If you know nothing about a person, the best guess to make about his or her religion is whatever the most common religion is. Always guessing the most common religion, you will make quite a few incorrect guesses. Assume the value of lambda for the relationship between race and religious affiliation is .65. By what proportion could you reduce your number of errors if, before you guess their religious affiliation, you are told their race?
A) .00
B) .35
C) .65
D) 1.00
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Page 10
Chapter 9: Pearsons Correlation and Bivariate Regression
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Sample Questions
Q1) What does a positive regression residual mean?
A) The two variables have a positive correlation.
B) That a case's actual value on the dependent variable is exactly what was predicted by the regression equation.
C) That a case's actual value on the dependent variable is greater than what was predicted by the regression equation.
D) The slope of the best-fitting straight line is positive.
Q2) If the correlation between a nation's population size and its economic standard of living is .86, then
A) Larger nations tend to be economically richer
B) Larger nations tend to be economically poorer.
C) Population size is not related to economic standard of living.
D) Population size accounts for 86% of a nation's economic standard of living.
Q3) Based on the regression equation Y = 200 + 50X, which of the following is true?
A) The regression line crosses the Y axis at 50.
B) The regression line rises as it moves to the right.
C) Cases with a value on X of 10 would be predicted to have a score of 260 on Y.
D) Cases with a value on X of 0 would be predicted to have a score of 250 on Y.
Q4) What kinds of questions can you answer using bivariate regression?
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Chapter 10: Multiple Regression
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Sample Questions
Q1) The regression equation is Y = 50 - 5X<sub>1</sub> + 10X<sub>2</sub>20X<sub>3</sub>. A case has a value of 1 on X<sub>1</sub>, 2 on X<sub>2</sub>, and 3 on X<sub>3</sub>. What's the predicted value?
A) 2
B) 5
C) 35
D) 48
Q2) According to the following regression equation: INCOME = 9000 + 2500(EDUC) 100(AGE) 5000(FEMALE), an increase of one year in education results in how much of a change in income? (State both the amount of change and the direction.)
Q3) In multiple regression, the slopes are
A) coefficients of alienation
B) coefficients of determination
C) standardized regression coefficients
D) unstandardized regression coefficients
Q4) What is multicollinearity and why is it a problem?
Q5) When would you use Crosstabs to look at the net effects of two independent variables on a dependent variable and when would you use Linear Regression?
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Chapter 11: Sampling Distributions and Normal Distributions
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Sample Questions
Q1) What kinds of questions can you answer using the properties of sampling distributions and normal distributions?
Q2) _____ are characteristics of populations; _____ are characteristics of samples.
A) parameters statistics
B) pointers values
C) statistics parameters
D) values pointers
Q3) Which sampling distribution will typically have the smallest standard error?
A) a sampling distribution based on samples from a population with a variance of 5
B) a sampling distribution based on samples from a population with a variance of 25
C) a sampling distribution based on samples from a population with a variance of 90
D) a sampling distribution based on samples from a population with a variance of 100
Q4) What does the central limit theorem say about sampling distributions?
Q5) What are confidence intervals, confidence levels, and margins of error?
Q6) What is the difference between a standard deviation and a standard error?
Q7) Why do researchers prefer sampling distributions with small standard errors?
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Page 13
Chapter 12: Hypothesis Testing and One-Sample T Tests
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Sample Questions
Q1) Which hypothesis gets tested in hypothesis testing?
A) alternative hypothesis
B) null hypothesis
C) research hypothesis
D) scientific hypothesis
Q2) What are the four steps in hypothesis testing?
Q3) What is Step 1 in hypothesis testing?
A) Check the significance level of your findings.
B) Convert ordinal and interval/ratio variables into nominal variables.
C) Select a 50% sample of your data for hypothesis testing.
D) State the research and the null hypothesis.
Q4) Your research hypothesis is that the average number of children is less than 2. Your null hypothesis is that the average number of children is 2 or more. The following results are consistent with the _____ and you proceed to _____.
A) null hypothesis Step 3 (check significance level)
B) null hypothesis Step 4 (state conclusion)
C) research hypothesis Step 3 (check significance level)
D) research hypothesis Step 4 (state conclusion)
Page 14
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Chapter 13: Paired and Independent-Samples T Tests
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Q1) An author reports the following information about a one-tailed independent-samples t test: t = 1.71, df = 17, p = .111. The sample means were consistent with the research hypothesis. Which of the following is true?
A) The two-tailed significance level must have been .222.
B) The null hypothesis was rejected
C) The two groups were significantly different.
D) All of the above are true.
Q2) For an independent-samples t test, the grouping variable (the variable whose attributes are used to identify the two groups to be compared) can be what level of measurement?
A) only interval/ratio
B) either interval/ratio or ordinal
C) interval/ratio, ordinal, or nominal
Q3) Which of the following hypotheses should be tested using a paired-samples t test?
A) The average posttest score was 78.
B) Women had the same average pretest score as men.
C) On average, persons' posttest scores were the same as their pretest scores.
D) Pretest and posttest scores were not correlated.
Q4) What kinds of questions can you answer using a paired-samples t test?
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Chapter 14: Analysis of Variance
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Sample Questions
Q1) Your research hypothesis is "In the population, the effect of occupation on number of work days per year lost due to injury varies by sex." What type of hypothesis test should be used?
A) one-sample t test
B) paired-samples t test
C) independent-samples t test
D) one-way ANOVA
E) two-way ANOVA
Q2) A researcher reports that her one-way ANOVA results were not significant. The following statistics are reported (F = 1.78, df = 7 and 1000, p = .13). How many groups were being compared and how big was the sample?
A) # of groups being compared ___________
B) # of cases in the sample ___________
Q3) Why is one-way ANOVA better than repeated independent-sample t tests for comparing means for three or more groups?
A) one-way ANOVA allows for a nominal dependent variable
B) one-way ANOVA is more likely to find a significant difference
C) repeated independent-samples t tests increase the chance of a Type I error
D) repeated independent-samples t tests increase the chance of multicollinearity
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Page 16
Chapter 15: Chi-Square
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Sample Questions
Q1) Variables included in a chi-square hypothesis test can have which levels of measurement?
Q2) Your research hypothesis is "In the population, persons drive at an average speed that is greater than 70 mph." What type of hypothesis test should be used?
A) one-sample t test
B) independent samples t test
C) one-way ANOVA
D) two-way ANOVA
E) chi-square
Q3) Your research hypothesis is "In the population, the average SAT score of persons the second time they take the test is higher than the average of those same persons the first time they took the test." What type of hypothesis test should be used?
A) one-sample t test
B) paired-samples t test
C) independent samples t test
D) two-way ANOVA
E) chi-square
Q4) What should you do next if chi-square is significant?
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17
Chapter 16: Hypothesis Testing With Measures of
Association and Regression
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Sample Questions
Q1) Hypothesis tests for which measures of association must be identified as one-tailed or two-tailed?
Q2) Before checking the significance levels of the net effects of the independent variables in a multiple regression, the significance of what should be checked?
Q3) What kinds of questions can you answer using tests of significance for regression coefficients?
Q4) For which of the following inferential statistics must you identify hypotheses as one-tailed or two-tailed?
A) chi-square
B) F ratio
C) t statistic
D) all of the above
Q5) Which SPSS procedure would you use to answer the question "Does gender have a significant net effect on amount given to charity after controlling for age and personal earnings?"
A) Bivariate Correlation
B) Chi-square
C) Linear Regression
D) One-way ANOVA
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