Data Description Study: Lighting And Hallucinogenic Drugs Essay.

You are given the job of finding out whether or not changing the lighting in an office from normal fluorescent lighting to red lighting will increase the alertness of data inputters and thereby decrease the number of errors they make. When you do this, you find that 20 data inputters decrease their number of errors per day by the following amounts:

1. What is the IV in this study?
2. What is the DV in this study?
3. Use SPSS to generate a box plot for the above set of scores.
4. Are the data normally distributed?
5. Are there any outliers shown in the boxplot? If yes, which score(s) are the outliers?
6. Using SPSS, what is the mean of the above scores? What is the standard deviation?

A group of final year students decides to see if the lecture material in Dr Boering’s lectures can be made more memorable. They decide that the best way to do this would be to take hallucinogenic drugs during the lectures. At the end of term there was an exam and those students who took drugs during the lecture obtained the following marks (%):

Those students in the class who did not take hallucinogenic drugs obtained the following

1. What is the IV in this study?
2. What is the DV in this study?
3. Use SPSS to plot histograms for the two sets of data and then answer the following:
4. Are the two sets of scores normally distributed?
5. Use SPSS to calculate the mean and standard deviations for both sets of scores. Which group has the highest mean? Which group has the greater variability in their scores?

Exercise 1: Data Description

1) The Independent Variable (IV) in the given study is the type of lighting that is used in the office which is altered by the researcher.

2) The Dependent Variable (DV) in the given study is the number of daily errors made by the inputters which is a function of the type of lighting used in the office.

3) For the given data, the box plot obtained using SPSS is indicated as follows.

2. a) The given data is clearly not normally distributed which is apparent from the box plot is not symmetric. It is evident from the box plot that the difference between Q2-Q1 is not equal to Q3 –Q2. Also, the maximum value is significantly greater owing to which there is presence of positive skew as indicated from the box plot (Flick, 2015).
3. b) From the box plot above, it is evident that there are five outliers in the given data as indicated by circles and asterisk, so the outliers are from scores 3, 4, 5, 13 and 14.
4. c) The mean and standard deviation of the given data is indicated as follows:

Exercise 2: Data Description

1) The IV in this study is if the students took or not hallucinogenic drugs while they were     attending Dr Boering’s lectures. 

2) The DV in this study is the marks obtained by students in the exam at the end of the term since the marks are supposed to be dependent on the decision taken by the students to consume or avoid consumption of hallucinogenic drug.

3) The histogram for the marks of those students who took hallucinogenic drugs in Dr. Boering’s lectures has been derived using SPSS as shown below:

The histogram for the marks of those students who did not take hallucinogenic drugs in Dr. Boering’s lectures has been derived using SPSS as shown below.

1. Based on the histograms of the scores for two sets of students shown above, it is apparent that  they can be assumed to be roughly normally distributed. This is on account of  the middle value in the distribution having the highest frequency and lower frequencies to the left and right (Ericsson & Kovalainen, 2015).
2. b) The corresponding outputs indicating the mean and standard deviation of marks of those students who took hallucinogenic drugs in Dr. Boering’s lectures has been derived using SPSS as shown below:

The corresponding outputs indicating the mean and standard deviation of marks of those students who did not take hallucinogenic drugs in Dr. Boering’s lectures has been derived using SPSS as shown below:

On the basis of the above outputs, it can be concluded that highest mean is exhibited by the group of students who did not take hallucinogenic drugs in Dr. Boering’s lectures. Variability is captured by standard deviation which is higher for the group of students who did take hallucinogenic drugs in Dr. Boering’s lectures (Hastie, Tibshirani & Friedman, 2016).

References

Eriksson, P. & Kovalainen, A. (2015). Quantitative methods in business research (3^rd Ed.).  London: Sage Publications.

Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R. & Friedman, J. (2016) The Elements of Statistical Learning (4^th ed.). New York: Springer Publications.