Exam 1: Statistics and Scientific Method

When one analyzes data based on a sample, one calculates a _________.

The goal of descriptive statistics is solely to summarize, and organize data.

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. All of the New York City adults constitute a _________.

In order to estimate the height of all students at your university, let's assume you have measured the height of all psychology majors at the university. If you had measured the height scores of all students at your university, these scores would constitute a _________.

The independent variable in an experiment is defined or identified as _________.

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 20 subjects constitute _________.

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 in the professor's class are called a _________.

A social scientist measured the number of years of education of a random group of people and asked them their income. The scientist then found that the longer the education, the higher the income.

Give three examples of a variable applying to people.

Data is defined as _________.

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 number of seizures for each of the 20 subjects constitutes _________.

Compare intuition and scientific method as methods of knowing.

In inferential statistics the object is usually to generalize from a _________ to a _________.

To avoid unknown, systematic factors that may bias the results of an experiment, the experimenter should select a _________ sample from a population and use controlled conditions.

A scientist asserts that properly collected data are essential to scientific method. Is she correct? Explain.

The only value of random sampling is to achieve a representative sample.

A sample is a subset of a population.

Define statistic.

Compare the method of authority with scientific method.

The dependent variable is the variable that is systematically manipulated.