Comparing Student Attitudes Towards Statistics- A Chi-Square Analysis of Nursing and Psychology Students’ Initial Reactions

Comparing Student Attitudes Towards Statistics- A Chi-Square Analysis of Nursing and Psychology Students’ Initial Reactions

Recall the four scales of measurement you learned about in Week 1 (i.e., nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio). Explain what scale of measurement is used to measure academic programs in this example. How do you know?

The data being analyzed in this case is categorical data. Under the four levels of measurement, the level of measurement used to measure the academic programs is a nominal scale. Statistically, a nominal scale categorizes data into nouns, which include names and categories of things, places, and attributes (Statistics Solutions, n.d d). The nominal scale also denotes the categories or labels and is mainly qualitative in nature. These measurement types are qualitative, but quantitative numerical data can be used to identify the objects under the nominal categories. The two nominal categories are psychology and nursing.

Explain what scale of measurement is used to measure feeling about PSYC 3002. Explain how you know.

The level of measurement used to measure the learners’ feelings about PSYC 3002 is an ordinal scale. An ordinal scale is suitable since it is used to categorize non-mathematical ideas such as feelings, satisfaction, happiness, and other similar attributes (Statistics Solutions, n. d). In this context, the students were asked whether they were nervous or excited about the course, which represents two types of feelings. Get in touch with us at eminencepapers.com. We offer assignment help with high professionalism.

State whether this scenario requires a goodness of fit test or a test of independence. Explain your answer.

The current scenario requires a test of independence to establish whether there is a significant correlation about the two student programs and how they are feeling about the PSYC 3002 course.

Before computing the chi-square, state the null hypothesis and alternative hypothesis in words (not formulas).

Therefore, the research question that guides the analysis is: Is there a significant association between the students’ feelings about the programs and the PSYC3002 course?

The two hypotheses guiding the study are;

Null Hypothesis (H_a): There is no association (independence) between the academic program and the student’s feelings about the PSYC 3002 course

Alternative Hypothesis (H₀): There is an association (dependence) between the academic program and the students’ feeling about PSYC 3002 course.

Identify the obtained χ2 using SPSS and report it in your answer document.

Chi-Square Tests
	Value	df	Asymptotic Significance (2-sided)	Exact Sig. (2-sided)	Exact Sig. (1-sided)
Pearson Chi-Square	1.626a	1	.202
Continuity Corrections	.616	1	.433
Likelihood Ratio	1.638	1	.201
Fisher’s Exact Test				.336	.217
Linear-by-Linear Association	1.544	1	.214
N of Valid Cases	20
a. 2 cells (50.0%) have an expected count of less than 5. The minimum expected count is 2.70.
b. Computed only for a 2×2 table

χ2 Value = 1.626

State the degrees of freedom and explain how you calculated it by hand.

Nursing Program * Psychology Program Crosstabulation
Count
		Psychology Program		Total
		Excited	Nervous
Nursing Program	Excited	9	2	11
	Nervous	5	4	9
Total		14	6	20

Degree of Freedom = (Total Rows -1) x (Total Columns – 1) = (2-1) x (2-1) = 1

Identify the p-value using SPSS and report it in your answer document.

Since the output table is a 2×2 contingency table, the p-value is obtained from Fischer’s Exact Test. The p-value is p= 0.336

Explain whether you should retain or reject the null hypothesis and why.

At a 5% level of significance, the p-value is greater than the alpha critical value (0.05). Using the upper-tail rule, we reject the null hypothesis (Field, 2018).

Are the results statistically significant? How do you know?

Since the p-value is greater than the alpha value, the results are not statistically significant.

Explain what you can determine about the relationship between the academic program and feelings about PSYC 3002.

From the analysis, the conclusion is that after rejecting the null hypothesis, we can deduce that there is an association between the academic programs and the students’ feelings about the PSYC 3002 course. However, since the results are statistically insignificant, there is no sufficient evidence to conclude that there is an association between the academic program and the students’ feelings about PSYC 3002 course.

References

Field, A. (2018). Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics. (4th Edition) California: SAGE Publications.

Heiman, G. (2015). Behavioral sciences STAT (2nd ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage.

Statistics Solutions. (n. d). Data Levels of Measurement. Retrieved from https://www.statisticssolutions.com/dissertation-resources/descriptive-statistics/data-levels-of-measurement/

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Assignment: Chi-Square
Previously, you worked with parametric statistics like t-tests, ANOVAs, and correlations in this course. To use parametric procedures such as those, the dependent variable must be measured on an interval or a ratio scale. Sometimes, however, the variables of interest are categorical; they are not measured on an interval or a ratio scale. For example, the categorical variables of gender, race, or political affiliation are not measured with interval or ratio scales. For this Assignment, you will examine the nonparametric procedure called chi-square, which allows you to analyze categorical data.

To prepare for this Assignment, imagine that you have information about how 20 nursing and 20 psychology students felt about starting PSYC 3002 on Day 1 of this class. You want to know if nursing and psychology students felt differently about embarking on the Introduction to Basic Statistics journey. You can find the data set for this assignment in the Weekly Data Set forum in the Discussions area of the course navigation menu.