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Your midterm exam will consist of two parts, a practical SPSS application test which will be worth 40% of the
test grade, and a multiple choice part which will be worth 60%. The practical SPSS test will consist of three
statistical applications: a t-test, a chi-square analysis, and a univariate analysis of variance, worth ten,
twelve, and eighteen points, respectively.
The multiple choice part of the test will consist of 40 questions drawn from this list. They will be worth 1.5
points each. The questions come from the class slides and the two required texts.
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Values used to make inferences about the characteristics of the population from which they were
drawn, including the variation of the sample characteristics from corresponding population parameters
are called
a. Descriptive statistics
b. Inferential statistics
c. Goodness-of-fit measures
d. Population parameters
A list of all the registered Republican voters in Los Angeles Country is an example of a
a. Population parameter
b. Independent variable
c. Macro-level construct
d. Sampling frame
Quasi-experimental studies differ from experimental studies in that in the quasi-experimental study the
experimenter
a. Has control over assignment of cases to conditions of the independent variable
b. Has control over assignment of cases to conditions of the dependent variable
c. Has control over when and where the dependent variable can be measured
d. Has no control over either dependent variable or independent variable
Which type of research relies on random assignment?
a. Experimental
b. Quasi-experimental
c. Naturalistic
d. Correlational
Which of the following could describe “reliability” in the context of quantitative research?
a. Test-retest correlation
b. Internal consistency of items on a test
c. Correlation with other measures of the same thing
d. A and B above
e. B and C above
f. A and C above
g. None of the above
Which of the following is an example of cluster sampling?
a. Randomly drawing a name out of a hat
b. Drawing randomly from randomly drawn lists of neighborhoods or zip codes
c. Sampling from a list which has proportional representation of ethnic groups or other
demographic characteristics in proportion to their numbers in the population
d. None of the above
Identify the independent variable in the following hypothesis: the impact of gender on job category is
thought to be mediated by educational attainment
a. Gender
b. Job category
c. Educational attainment
d. None of the above
Identify the dependent variable in the following hypothesis: the impact of gender on job category is
mediated by educational attainment
a. Gender
b. Job category
c. Educational attainment
d. None of the above
Identify the control variable in the following hypothesis: the impact of gender on job category is
mediated by educational attainment
a. Gender
b. Job category
c. Educational attainment
d. None of the above
10. Which of the following is an example of a categorical variable?
a. Type of communications medium
b. Political attitudes
c. Income
d. None of the above
11. Which of the following is an example of a continuous variable?
a. Number of hours spent watching TV every day
b. Gender
c. Ethnicity
d. All of the above
12. Which of the following is an example of interval level measurement?
a. IQ test
b. Gender
c. Weight
d. Political Affiliation
13. Which of the following is an example of ratio level measurement?
a. Political affiliation
b. Hours spent surfing the Net
c. Preference among brands of cereal
d. All of the above
14. Which of the following is an example of nominal level measurement?
a. Ethnicity
b. Rankings in a beauty contest
c. Temperature
d. Income in dollars
15. A summary which gives an account of how often answers in each category of responses to a question
occur within a sample is called a
a. Dendogram
b. Normal distribution
c. Kurtosis
d. Frequency distribution
16. In the picture below, how would the summary of the data represented in the picture be described?
a. A homogeneous distribution
b. A heterogenous distribution
c. A normal distribution
d. None of the above
Know What Neighbors Are Like
1.2
1.0
.8
.6
Frequency
.4
.2
0.0
Strongly Disagree
Neither Agree nor Di
Disagree
Strongly Agree
Agree
Know What Neighbors Are Like
17. A distribution in which most of the cases occur at the low end of the scale is called
a. Negatively skewed
b. Positively skewed
c. Leptokurtic
d. Platykurtic
18. A distribution in which most of the cases are peaked around the mean is called
a. Negatively skewed
b. Positively skewed
c. Leptokurtic
d. Platykurtic
19. Which of the measures below does this describe: Measure which is most stable for random
samples, which makes it suitable for making estimates about populations from samples. It
has the property that the sum of the deviations of the raw scores from it equals zero.
a. Standard deviation
b. Mode
c. Mean
d. Median
20. Which of the measures below does this describe: the response value for which there are an
equal number of responses both below and above it (e.g., larger or smaller). Used with
ordinal or numerical variables
a. Standard deviation
b. Mode
c. Mean
d. Median
21. Which of the measures below does this describe: the most frequently selected (commonly
occurring) response category. The only measure for nominal level variables but can be used
with scaled data.
a. Standard deviation
b. Mode
c. Mean
d. Median
22. What is the effect of an “outlier” on the mean?
a. Makes it more different from the median
b. Makes it more similar to the median
c. Keeps the distribution from being used for inferential statistics
d. None of the above
23. What is the property of a sample described here: the degree or amount of variability in a set
of responses to a quantitative measure such as a questionnaire item
a. The significance
b. The mean
c. Dispersion
d. Kurtosis
24. The index of qualitative variation would be used for what kind of data?
a. Nominal
b. Ordinal
c. Ratio
d. Interval
25. What is the following a definition of? the sum of the squared deviations from the sample
mean, divided by N-1 where N is the number of cases.
a. The mean
b. The harmonic mean
c. The dispersion
d. The variance
26. What is the square root of the property described in 25 called?
a. The standard deviation
b. The interquartile point
c. The range
d. The variance
27. The mean, median and mode of responses all coincide in a
a. Platykurtic distribution
b. Normal distribution
c. Skewed distribution
d. None of the above
28. What is the measure that has the following properties: it allows you to make comparisons
between samples with respect to their variability (how much a respondent from the sample
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typically departs from the mean). Its size is generally about one-sixth the size of the value of
the range
a. The standard deviation
b. The interquartile point
c. The harmonic mean
d. The variance
What is this a definition of? deviation of a raw score from the mean in standard deviation
units
a. A standard score
b. A z score
c. Both A and B
d. Neither A nor B
In a normal distribution, what percentage of scores fall above the mean?
a. 68%
b. 34%
c. 50%
d. 95%
About what percent of cases fall within 2 SDs of the mean?
a. 68%
b. 34%
c. 50%
d. 95%
According to the Central Limit Theorem, the larger the sample size, the greater the probability
that the obtained sample mean will ________ the population mean
a. Depart from
b. Be the opposite of
c. Be the standard deviation of
d. Approximate
In the normal table (“Area under the Normal Curve” ) you look up a Z score of 2.2 and to the
right of that you find the “area between the mean and Z” is 48.61. Thus 48.61% of the cases
in the normal distribution lie between the mean and Z=2.2. What proportion of cases lie
below this?
a. 34.39%
b. 1.39%
c. 98.61%
d. 50. 61%
What proportion of cases lie above this?
a. 34.39%
b. 1.39%
c. 98.61%
d. 50. 61%
The standard deviation of the sampling distribution of sample means is called the
a. Standard error of the mean
b. Variability of the mean
c. Alpha coefficient
d. Variance
What is the term for how much statistics can be expected to deviate from parameters when
sampling randomly from the population
a. Standard error of the mean
b. Variability of the mean
c. Alpha coefficient
d. Variance
What is the relationship between sample size and the property described in (36) above?
a. It gets greater with increased sample size
b. It gets greater as the square of sample size increases
c. It gets smaller as the inverse of sample size increases
d. It gets smaller with increased sample size
38. Suppose we had the following data: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. and we calculated their mean as 35/5 = 7.
What are the degrees of freedom in computing the mean?
a. 5
b. 4
c. 3
d. 1
39. Suppose we wanted to construct a confidence interval around the mean of 2969.56 such that
we can have 95% confidence that the population mean for the variable “vehicle weight” will
fall within this range. To obtain this confidence interval, we would need to take the mean and
add to it the quantity (1.96 times the standard error). What does the number 1.96 represent
in this case?
a. A constant which would apply to all such calculations
b. The beta weight associated with the variable
c. The risk area under the normal curve corresponding to 5%
d. The difference between the mean weight and the next higher weight
40. A _______ variable is one on which each case is coded for either presence or absence of
the attribute. For example, we could recode the ethnicity data into the ______ variable
“whiteness” or “Chinese-ness” so that every case would have either a 1 or a zero on the
variable. All of the white (or Chinese) respondents would get a 1 and the others would get a
zero on the variable. This kind of variable is called a
a. Dummy variable
b. Control variable
c. Composite variable
d. Mediator variable
41. Which of the following is an example of a null hypothesis?
a. There is no difference between males and females in attitudes toward voting
b. Males and females differ in their attitudes towards voting
c. Males tend to vote more often than females
d. The relationship between sex and voting is unknown
42. Statistical significance is
a. an indicator of the importance of the relationship between two variables
b. an indicator of the probability of a test statistic being the result of chance alone.
c. a sign that your sample was drawn randomly
d. a sign that you have eliminated random error
43. A student calculated a Chi square statistic with a significance level of .01 for a table relating
gender to voting behavior for those 40-50 years old. She calculated a Chi square statistic with a
significance level of .25 for the same two variables for those 20-30 years old. Which of the
following best summarizes the findings?
a. She can be more sure that the obtained relationship between gender and voting
behavior among those 40-50 years old was not just a chance result than the obtained
relationship for those 20-30 years old.
b. She can be relatively sure that the relationship between gender and voting behavior is
strong
c. The relationship between gender and voting behavior is stronger for those 40-50 years
old than for those 20-30 years old
d. The level of association between gender and voting behavior is quite low for both
groups.
44. We are conducting an empirical study that examines the relationship of communication
frequency and relationship stability in couples married for at least 3 years. Which is the
independent variable? Which is the dependent variable?
a. independent variable: relationship stability
dependent variable: communication frequency
b. independent variable: length of marriage
dependent variable: relationship stability
c. independent variable: communication frequency
dependent variable: length of marriage
d. can’t tell from the information given
45. What kinds of question should we not explore through a contingency table?
a. What are the differences in job classification attributable to gender?
b. What is the impact of gender on socio-economic status?
c. How does temperature affect annual rainfall?
d. How does job classification affect preference for news source?
46. In a chi-square analysis the principal interest is in comparing the obtained frequencies to the
a. Column frequencies
b. Row marginals
c. Obtained marginals
d. Expected frequencies
47. Consider the contingency table below: What appears to be the relationship between
educational attainment and employment category?
Employment Category * Educational Attainment Crosstabulation
Employment
Category
Cus todial
Clerical
Manager
Total
48.
49.
50.
51.
Count
% within Educational
Attainment
Count
% within Educational
Attainment
Count
% within Educational
Attainment
Count
% within Educational
Attainment
Educational Attainment
elementary
college or
s chool
high s chool profes s sional
13
13
1
Total
27
24.5%
6.8%
.4%
5.7%
40
176
146
362
75.5%
92.6%
63.5%
76.5%
0
1
83
84
.0%
.5%
36.1%
17.8%
53
190
230
473
100.0%
100.0%
100.0%
100.0%
a. Educational attainment has an impact on job category only for elementary school
graduates
b. Educational attainment is associated with employment category.
c. Only clerical work is affected by educational attainment.
d. None of the above.
Lambda is a
a. Measure of association for interval level variables
b. Reliability coefficient
c. Measure of proportional reduction of error for contingency tables
d. Measure only used for ordinal level variables
Lambda is sometimes flawed as a measure because it
a. Ranges from -1 to +1
b. Doesn’t test significance
c. Comes out to zero quite a lot
d. Is too hard to calculate
An alternative to lambda which SPSS reports is
a. Alpha
b. Tau
c. Chi-square
d. Gamma
One of the things we can do in a cross-tabulation analysis is to look for the effect of a control
variable on the relationship between an independent and dependent variable. In the table
below, which is the control variable?
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a. gender
b. educational attainment
c. employment category
d. status as a manager
Which of the following is not a step in statistical hypothesis testing?
a. Specify the research hypothesis and corresponding null hypothesis
b. Compute the value of a test statistic about the relationship between the two
hypotheses
c. Calculate the DF and look up the statistic in the appropriate distribution to see if it
falls into the critical region
d. If the result is not significant, move the critical region lower until you reach
significance
The null hypothesis with respect to the relationship between two variables is that
a. The population and the sample means are different
b. The variables are independent of one another
c. There is no way to determine if the relationship is significant
d. The two variables are related to one another
Which of the following statements about chi-square is correct?
a. Chi-square ranges between -1 and 1
b. Chi-square can be interpreted as an index of the proportional reduction of error
c. Chi-square is a measure of the statistical independence of two variables
d. The larger the value of chi-square for a constant value of DF, the less the
dependence of the two variables (the weaker their association)
Which of the following is a way of controlling for the influence of extraneous variables in an
experiment?
a. The case-control method
b. Randomization
c. Large numbers of subjects
d. Test-retest reliability
The ability to show that the causal impact of an independent variable on a dependent variable
is legitimate and not attributable to other extraneous and uncontrolled variables is called
a. Construct validity
b. Statistical conclusion validity
c. External validity
d. Internal validity
57. A “manipulation check is” a way of ensuring adequate
a. Construct validity
b. Statistical conclusion validity
c. External validity
d. Internal validity
58. Features of an experimental setting or questionnaire which induce people to behave in an
artificial way are called
a. Demand characteristics
b. Debriefing
c. Experimental attrition
d. Normative role decay
59. Which of the following is an example of method variance?
a. Changing the gender of the experimenter when gender is not a variable in the study
b. Using paper and pencil measures on one occasion and an interview on another
c. Using different incentives for different subjects when incentive is not a variable
d. All of the above
e. None of the above
60. Which of the following types of scale does this describe: an object of judgment is evaluated
against a set of rating scales (usually five to seven steps) with bi-polar adjectives at either
end, such as good-bad or friendly-unfriendly
a. Likert scale
b. Guttman scale
c. Rausch scale
d. Semantic differential scale
61. Which of the following types of scales does this describe: people are asked to indicate if they
strongly agree, agree, are neutral, disagree, or strongly disagree with declarative statements
about a topic.
a. Likert scale
b. Rausch scale
c. Semantic differential scale
d. None of the above
62. Which of the following might be a problem with the way that people fill out questionnaires?
a. They prefer odd numbers to even ones
b. The have a tendency to disagree with statements rather than agree with them
c. They give their best responses toward the end of the questionnaire
d. They may reject items with “always” and “never”
63. Underlying the t statistic is a sampling distribution of
a. Sample means
b. Population means
c. Differences of sample means
d. Standard error of sample means
64. The t test is for comparing
a. The difference of means for two independent groups
b. The difference of means for dependent samples
c. The difference of a sample mean and a population mean
d. All of the above
e. None of the above
65. What is the DF of a t test comparing two independent groups where one group has a N of 20
and the other an N of 38?
a. 18
b. 58
c. 56
d. 760
66. In conducting a t-test, the researcher can do a one-tailed or a two-tailed test. Under what
circumstances would a one-tailed test be conducted?
a. When the researcher hoped to have a bigger critical area for getting significance
b. When the researcher had predicted the direction of the mean differences
c. When the sample was not normal with respect to the underlying distribution
d. None of the above
67. If I do a two-tailed test of my hypotheses and set the confidence level to .05, what area under
the normal curve does my obtained value of t have to fall in to obtain significance?
a. The upper 5% of either end of the distribution
b. The upper 2.5% of either end of the distribution
c. The upper ten percent of either end of the distribution
d. The upper 5% of whatever end I predict it’s going to fall in
68. In certain cases, for example in “before and after” designs or when members of group A have
been matched with members of group B on all salient characteristics except one, the variable
of interest, an alternative formula for computing t is used. What is the main difference of this t
from the t for independent samples?
a. t is based on the departure of the difference scores from the mean difference score
b. You use a different menu option in SPSS
c. The scores in post-test groups are known to be higher
d. All of the above
69. We find out if the _________________ in two groups are equal before deciding on what sort
of t-test we will perform
a. Means
b. Standard errors
c. Medians
d. Variances
70. An analysis of variance looks for the causal impact of a nominal level independent variable
(factor) on
a. A nominal variable
b. An ordinal variable
c. An interval or ratio level variable
d. Any of the above
71. How many categories of the independent variable can there be in an ANOVA?
a. At least two
b. At least four
c. Less than three
d. Only one
72. In one type of ANOVA design the same subjects are tested multiple times on the same
dependent measure (example, trials 1, 2, 3, …n). The experimenter is interested in whether there
will be changes as a function of the number of trials. This is called a
a. Within-trials design
b. Between-subjects design
c. Repeated measures design
d. A or C
e. B or C
73. The ANOVA test (F) involves comparing the between estimate to the ___________ estimate.
a. Total
b. Partitioned
c. Intercept
d. Within
74. Degrees of freedom for the ANOVA test are
a. N-1
b. N-1 and N-K
c. K-1
d. K-1 and N-K
75. What is the statistic used to test for equality of the group variances in ANOVA?
a. Tukey
b. Levene
c. Sheffé
d. Duncan
76. Which one of these statistics is not used for post-hoc comparisons of means?
a. Tukey
b. Levene
c. Sheffé
d. Tamhane