4. Describe what are "Nominal Data", "Ordinal Data", and "Scale Data" in SPSS software.

(15 marks) a) Describe their definitions and differences, respectively; (10 marks) b) Giving 5 examples for each of these three types of data (5 marks) Answer; In SPSS you can specify the level of measurement as scale (numeric data on an interval or ratio scale), ordinal, or nominal. Nominal and ordinal data can be either string alphanumeric or numeric. The name 'Nominal' comes from the Latin nomen, meaning 'name' and nominal data are items which are differentiated by a simple naming system. A variable can be treated as nominal when its values represent categories with no intrinsic ranking. Nominal items may have numbers assigned to them. Nominal items are usually categorical, in that they belong to a definable category, such as 'employees'. For example, in a data set for gender males could be coded as 0, females as 1. Marital status, single could be coded as 0, married as 1, divorced as 2. Religion affiliation, muslim-1, buddist-2, hindu-3, christian-0. Region, Asia-1, Europe-2, Australia-3, Africa-4, South America-5, North America-6. Another good example is race/ethnicity has values 1=White, 2=Hispanic, 3=American Indian, 4=Black, 5=other. Note that the order of the categories is arbitrary. Rank-ordering data simply puts the data on an ordinal scale (we sometimes call 'Discrete Data'). Ordinal measurements describe order, but not relative size or degree of difference between the items measured. In this scale type, the numbers assigned to objects or events represent the rank order (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) of the entities assessed. Letters or other sequential symbols may also be used as appropriate. Ordinal items are usually categorical, in that they belong to a definable category, such as '1956 marathon runners'. An example of an ordinal scale is the result of a horse race, which says only which horses arrived first, second, or third but include no information about race times. A Likert Scale is a type of ordinal scale and may also use names with an order such as: "bad", "medium", and "good"; or "very satisfied", "satisfied", "neutral", "unsatisfied", "very unsatisfied." Data values are categorical and may be ranked in some numerically meaningful way. For example, strongly disagree to strong agree may be defined as 1 to 5. Another is the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, which characterizes the hardness of various minerals through the ability of a harder material to scratch a softer one, saying nothing about the actual hardness of any of them. Yet another example is military ranks; they have an order, but no welldefined numerical difference between ranks. A variable can be treated as scale when its values represent ordered categories with a meaningful metric, so that distance comparisons between values are appropriate. Quantitative attributes are all measurable on interval scales, as any difference between the levels of an attribute can be multiplied by any real number to exceed or equal another difference. A highly familiar example of interval scale measurement is temperature with the Celsius scale. Other examples of scale variables include age in years, income in thousands of dollars, person s weight in kilograms and etc.

5. Describe what Crosstabs Analysis is, and give 3 practical examples or scenarios to explain what "Crosstabs Analysis" tests for. Answer; The Crosstabs procedure forms two-way and multi-way tables and provides a variety of tests and measures of association for two-way tables. The structure of the table and whether categories are ordered determine what test or measure to use. Crosstabs' statistics and measures of association are computed for two-way tables only. If you specify a row, a column, and a layer factor (control variable), the Crosstabs procedure forms one panel of associated statistics and measures for each value of the layer factor (or a combination of values for two or more control variables). For example, if gender is a layer factor for a table of married (yes, no) against life (is life exciting, routine, or dull), the results for a two-way table for the females are computed separately from those for the males and printed as panels following one another. The examples or scenarios to explain what "Crosstabs Analysis" tests for are first, customers from small companies more likely to be profitable in sales of services (training and consulting) than those from larger companies? From a cross tabulation, you might learn that the majority of small companies (fewer than 500 employees) yield high service profits, while the majority of large companies (more than 2,500 employees) yield low service profits. Second scenario, in order to determine customer satisfaction rates, a retail company conducted surveys of 582 customers at 4 store locations. From the survey results, you found that the quality of customer service was the most important factor to a customer's overall satisfaction. Given this information, you want to test whether each of the store locations provides a similar and adequate level of customer service. Third example, we want to know which voters support death penalty, which voters who are oppose the death penalty. Let s look at the relationship between voter (republican, democrat, none, other) and the death_threelevels variable we created, where 1=support death penalty, 2=neutral, and 3=oppose death penalty.This example is a 4 x 3. From this survey we can see that the republicans mostly support the death penalty, and democrats mostly vote to oppose death penalty.

6. Describe what are "One-Sample T-test", "Independent-sample T-test", and "Paired-Samples T Test", respectively; and give 2 practical examples or scenarios for each of these three kinds of tests to explain what they test for. Answer; There are three types of t-tests, A One Sample t-test is used to evaluate whether the mean of a continuous dependent variable is different from a specified constant. To test if the mean is different than some other value, subtract that value from each observation and the test to see if the mean of the new values is zero. A one-sample t-test helps determine whether (the population mean) is equal to a hypothesized value (the test mean).The test uses the standard deviation of the sample to estimate (the population standard deviation). If the difference between the sample mean and the test mean is large relative to the variability of the sample mean, then is unlikely to be equal to the test mean. For example, a manufacturer of high-performance automobiles produces disc brakes that must measure 322 millimetres in diameter. Quality control randomly draws 16 discs made by each of eight production machines and measures their diameters. This example uses the file brakes.sav. Use One Sample T Test to determine whether or not the mean diameters of the brakes in each sample significantly differ from 322 millimetres. Another example, you hear that the average college students sleep 6 hours a day. You ask 20 college kids how long they sleep on an average day. You get the data and the mean of sleep time is 6.5 hours. Use One Sample T Test to determine whether or not the mean of sleep time differ from 6 hours a day. A researcher might want to test whether the average IQ score for a group of students differs from 100. Or, a cereal manufacturer can take a sample of boxes from the production line and check whether the mean weight of the samples differs from 1.3 pounds at the 95% confidence level. An Independent Samples t-test is used when cases are randomly assigned to one of two groups. After a differential treatment has been applied to the two groups, a measurement is taken which is related to the effect of the treatment. The t-test is calculated to determine if any difference between the two groups is statistically significant. In the independent samples t-test, the purpose of randomly assigning the people to groups is to control for the effect of other differences between people that might have affected the effect we re measuring. Using the matched pairs has the same goal, but now the theory is that we have matched the subjects on the concomitant variables. This is not the case if you compare average income for males and females. A person is not randomly assigned to be a male or female. In such situations, you should ensure that differences in other factors are not masking or enhancing a significant difference in means. Differences in average income may be influenced by factors such as education (and not by sex alone). For example, patients with high blood pressure are randomly assigned to a placebo group and a treatment group. The placebo subjects receive an inactive pill, and the treatment subjects receive a new drug that is expected to lower blood pressure. After the subjects are treated for two months, the two-sample t test is used to compare the average blood pressures for the placebo group and the treatment group. Each patient is measured once and belongs to one group. Another example, supposes you collected data on the heights of male basketball and football players, and compared the sample means using the t test. A probability of 0.4

would mean that there is 40% likelihood that you cannot distinguish a group of basketball players from a group of football players by height alone. That's about as far as the t test or any statistical test, for that matter, can take you. If you calculate a probability of 0.05 or less, then you can reject the null hypothesis (that is, you can conclude that the two groups of athletes can be distinguished by height). A Paired Samples t-test can be used to evaluate differences between two groups who have been matched on one or more characteristics or evaluate differences in before/after measures on same person. If you want to use pre/post measures, make sure the post-test is the same as the pre-test. This is one of the most common errors in research. The procedure computes the differences between values of the two variables for each case and tests whether the average differs from 0. For example, in a study on high blood pressure, all patients are measured at the beginning of the study, given a treatment, and measured again. Thus, each subject has two measures, often called before and after measures. An alternative design for which this test is used is a matched-pairs or case-control study, in which each record in the data file contains the response for the patient and also for his or her matched control subject. In a blood pressure study, patients and controls might be matched by age (a 75-year-old patient with a 75-year-old control group member). Suppose that we are required to examine if a newly developed intervention program for disadvantaged students has an impact. For this purpose, we need to obtain scores from a sample of n such students in a standardized test before administering the program. After the program is over, the same test needs to be administered to the same group of students and scores obtained again. There are two samples: 1) the sample of prior intervention scores (pre-test) and, 2) the post intervention scores (post-test). The samples are related in the sense that each pre-test has a corresponding post-test as both were obtained from the same student.