Statistics and Statistical Programming (Winter 2017)/Problem Set: Week 1

Statistical Questions

Excercises from OpenIntro §1

Several of these questions draw from Study 4 of the following paper (although I don't think it critical to look back at that paper to answer of the questions):

Piff, Paul K., Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner. 2012. “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(11):4086–91. [Available through UW Libraries]

Q1. Exercise 1.6 about identifying cases, variables, types, and research questions

Q2. Exercise 1.12 about populations, samples, and generalizability

Q3. Exercise 1.52 about means and medians from a histogram

Q4. Exercise 1.56 about skewness and choosing appropriate statistics

Q6. Exercise 1.64 about selecting certain types of visualizations over others

Empirical Paper

Hopefully many of you will have read this paper already. It's probably the most highly cited (and publicly discussed) paper to come out of communication over the last few years:

Kramer, Adam D. I., Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2014. “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(24):8788–90. [Available through UW libraries]

Although there are major ethical concerns with the paper, and we'll be coming back and talking about it a number of times this quarter, lets focus on the key issues of research design and the substantive takeaway.

For this paper, answer each of these questions and be ready to cite parts of the paper that support each claim:

Q7. Identify identify (a) the cases, (b) the variables and their types, and (c) the main research question of this piece.

Q8. (a) What are the treatment and control groups in this study? (b) What type of sampling does the study use? (c) Describe the experimental manipulation.

Q9. Identify the studies (a) population of interest and (b) the sample used in the study. (c) Do you think that this study can be generalized from the sample to the population?

Q10. There is one figure in the paper (Figure 1). Walk us through the figure and explain what it represents and reflects.

Q11. (a) Summarize the results of the study. What is the size of the effect? What do you think the important takeaway from this paper should be?

Programming Challenges

Because this is our first week, there are no formal programming challenges this week.