PSY 510 : Contemporary and Ethical Issues in Psychology

Task:

Before you begin the assignment:

Review the video tutorial in the Module Six resources for an overview of exploring data and running descriptive statistics.

Access and open the Album Sales SPSS data set. Data adapted from Field, A. (2013). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

An overview of the data set:

This data set contains data for 200 different rock albums (i.e., each row in the data set represents the data for one album). Specifically, the following variables are included:

AlbumNumber: This is the ID number of the album. There are 200 albums, so this variable ranges from 1 to 200.
RecordCompany: This is the record company that promoted the album. Values of “1” stand for Next Generation Records, and values of “2” stand for Worldwide Entertainment.
Adverts: This is the advertising budget of the album. The values are in thousands of dollars.
Sales: These are the sales of the album. The values are in thousands of sales.
Airplay: This is the number of times that the album was played on the radio in the last year.
Attract: This is the overall physical attractiveness of the band as rated by independent raters. The values for this variable range from 1 to 10.

Questions:

1a) Create separate histograms of the Adverts, Sales, and Airplay variables.

1b) Does the distribution of any of these variables seem to approximate a normal distribution? If so, which one(s)?

1c) Do any of these variables have any outliers? If so, identify the variable and the outlier.

2a) Create separate boxplots for Adverts, Sales, and Airplay.

2b) From the boxplots, can you identify any outliers? If so, identify the variable and the outlier.

3) Why do you think it is important to spend some time visualizing your data using techniques such as histograms and boxplots? If you do not think it is important, explain why.

4a) What are the means and standard deviations for Adverts, Sales, Airplay, and Attract? List below each variable along with its mean and standard deviation.

4b) Choose one of the variables from question 4a. Explain in your own words what the mean and standard deviation tell us about scores for the variable you have chosen.