Factors Influencing Employment, Academic Disciplines, and Statistical Techniques

Short answer questions on the best analytical method to predict employment in different fields

1.A colleague of yours is interested in studying which factors contribute to developing a career in one of three occupational fields – accounting, engineering, and health care. He has a dataset measuring thirty different variables related to job aptitude and wants to conduct an exploratory study to determine which of those variables predict employment in one of the three fields. He has collected a sizable dataset (N = 123,202) and wants to use the information from the current study to develop another study in the future. He asks you what the best analysis for him might be. What do you recommend? 

 

2. In class, we mentioned that there were two types of factor analysis – exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. What is the difference between the two, and when would you use them?

 

3. What is the most common application of a power analysis? Why is this true?

 

4. You are working as a research psychologist at an international aid organization, when a friend and colleague comes to ask your opinion on what analysis he should use. He tells you that he wants to predict general quality of life of people in one of five countries around the world. He tells you that he will recruit participants from mental health organizations within the countries and give half of the participants a brief intervention on using positive psychology, and the other half no intervention. He will then give them a battery of questions assessing optimism about their lives once a year for up to five years. He will then compare the results to see how quality of life changes over time in each country. Unfortunately, unlike you, he did not have a rock star for a statistics teacher and cannot identify the correct analysis. You smile, knowing you did, and calmly make your suggestion. What analysis do you suggest and why?

5. Which of the following does NOT measure within groups variance?

 

A. Repeated measures ANOVA.
B. Hierarchical multivariate linear regression.
C. Multilevel linear modelling. 
D. Mixed ANOVA
E. All of these analyses measure within group variance. 

 

6. You have a colleague who is interested in developing a scale to measure acculturation among second generation South African immigrants in the United States. She has developed a series of items she created which she believes will be useful in assessing this phenomenon but is unsure how to analyze them. She asks you what you recommend.

Explanation of the differences between exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses

 

A. Exploratory factor analysis
B. Multilevel linear modelling
C. Discriminant function analysis
D. Multivariate analysis of covariance
E. All of these analyses could help her

 

7. Assume you have just conducted an analysis comparing the means of male and female postal workers looking at feelings of isolation.  Your goal was to determine if males (N = 24) were significantly different from females (N = 28) on the feelings of isolation measure. After you completed your analysis, you found males (M = 3.11; SD = 1.07) experienced significantly higher levels of isolation than did females (M = 1.64; SD = 0.74); t = -6.481, p = .001. Based on this information, what can you ascertain about its power?

 

A. It was under-powered
B. It was adequately powered
C. It was over-powered
D. There is insufficient data to determine the effect size.

 

8. One of the most important things this Statistics course gave me was…

 

A. …a feeling of wonder at the amazing world of statistics! I may just drop this whole psychology thing to become a statistician!
B. …fun stories for parties! I’ve never been as popular at parties as I am now when I start talking about how Levene’s test works!
C. …a great new idea for that awesome tattoo I’ve been thinking about. Nothing says “I’m awesome” like the z-score formula tattooed on my shoulder! Standardized life forever!!
D. Secretly, I know these things are true, but I’m going to play it cool in front of my friends and pretend I didn’t absolutely love the course.

For analysis use the dataset labeled FINAL DATA. It can be found in your Canvas shell under files/data. You may either convert the data to SPSS, or copy and paste it into SPSS. Note on the second tab in the excel sheet is a data dictionary. It will give you a bit of information on the types of variables you are using. Be sure to clean the data (i.e., check for invalid entries and remove them). Also note that you may not need all of the variables provided in that dataset to answer the following items.

 

9.  Suppose you are interested in doing a preliminary study to determine if there are differences among males in mean scores of marijuana from time one to time two. As this study is only preliminary, you will not need to control for any other variables. Remember to provide relevant outputs, syntax and report your results in full. (3pts)

 

10. Your clinic typically specializes in treating anxiety, but lately you have noticed a curious uptick in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses. You have a theory that demographic factors such as age and sex might play an important role in whether someone has ADHD, but you also think the ADHD diagnosis may be related to a diagnosis of anxiety. Select the appropriate analysis to determine if an anxiety diagnosis predicts ADHD diagnoses while controlling for age and sex of the participant. 

 

Select the appropriate analysis to address which factors contribute to ADHD. Remember to provide relevant outputs, syntax and report your results in full. (5 pts)

 

11. After some time working with this population, you decide that you need to determine how to promote coping skills. You suspect that the age of the participant would play an important role in coping skills, but you want to determine how the presence of other factors may improve upon the model consisting only of participant age. Specifically, you theorize that familial support plays a major role in developing coping skills and feel that strong economic stability would provide someone with the resources necessary to cope effectively. Select the appropriate analysis to predict whether coping skills and economic stability predict coping skills above and beyond age alone. 

 

Select the appropriate analysis to compare the two models to determine which factors predict coping skills. Remember to provide relevant outputs, syntax and report your results in full. (5 pts)

 

12. Finally, you suspect that among participants older than 30 years of age, anxiety and depression may make holding a steady job difficult. You theorize that participants elevated rates of anxiety and/or depression may make people more likely to be unemployed or have part time employment rather than full time employment. You also suspect that coping skills may impact this relationship and needs to be controlled for. 

 

Select the appropriate analysis to address which factors contribute to employment status. Remember to provide relevant outputs, syntax and report your results in full. (5 pts)