Exam 1: Statistics and Scientific Method

In order to estimate the amount of TV watched by New York City adults, a sociologist surveys a random sample of adults from this city. The obtained raw scores are called _________.

I am certain I will find this course _________.

Which method of knowing is used in the following example? An individual accepts as true that black holes exist because 10 physics Nobel laureates assert such is the case.

Define inferential statistics.

A population is defined as _________.

In order to estimate the ratio of white to black students in his college, a professor determines the proportion of whites and blacks in his class. The resulting proportion is called a _________.

In order to estimate the ratio of white to black students in his college, a professor determines the proportion of whites and blacks in his class. The students of the entire college are called a _________.

The independent variable is the variable that is measured to determine the effect of the independent variable.

In order to determine cause and effect, a researcher needs to do a true experiment.

One task of research is to study a subset of the population and try to make inferences about the whole population.

Let's assume you are conducting an experiment to determine the effect of a new drug on the incidence of epileptic seizures. You select 20 epileptics from the 150 epileptics being treated at a nearby hospital and administer the drug to them. You record the number of seizures in each of the 20 subjects for one month. The 150 epileptics constitute _________.

Define independent variable.

Inferential statistics uses the sample data to generalize to populations.

Let's assume you are conducting an experiment to determine the effect of a new drug on the incidence of epileptic seizures. You select 20 epileptics from the 150 epileptics being treated at a nearby hospital and administer the drug to them. You record the number of seizures in each of the 20 subjects for one month. Then you record the number of seizures in each of the 20 subjects for one month without the drug. Being compulsive, you also record the number of seizures for the remaining 130 epileptics for one month. The number of seizures for each of the 130 epileptics constitutes _________.

If someone asked you the average height of everyone in your family and you actually measured each of the people in your family to calculate the average, have you calculated a statistic or parameter?

In the equation Y = bX + a , b is a(n) _________.

A developmental psychologist conducts an experiment to determine if exposure to an enriched environment shortly after birth will cause increased brain development. Twenty, two month old rats are randomly selected from a pool of one thousand, two month old, rat pups. Ten of the twenty pups are exposed to an enriched environment for three weeks and the other ten to the usual environment for the same period of time. At a suitable time after the exposure, the psychologist measures the number of neurons per cm³ in the brain of each rat. A comparison is then made of the mean number of neurons per cm³ for each group. Identify the following:

Another scientist is interested in parameter estimation. When asked to estimate the average income in a city he went to the Millionaire's Club and asked each person their average income. What was wrong with that process?

Which method of knowing is used in the following example? You have been struggling to determine the underlying explanation for the sadness you have been feeling for the past couple of months. Since you haven't come up with the explanation, you give up on the struggle and decide to just go on with your life. Two days later, an explanation pops into your consciousness that you are convinced is correct.

Intuition is often used as part of scientific method.