Testing of Hypotheses
Harris, Schoen, and Hensley (1992)conducted a research study showing how cultural experience can influencememory They presented participants with two different versions of stories Oneversion contained facts or elements that were consistent with a US Culture andthe second version contained material consistent with a Mexican culture Theresults showed that the participants tended to make memory errors for theinformation that was not consistent with their own culture Specifically,participants from Mexico either forgot or distorted information that was uniqueto US Culture, and participants from the United States forgot or distortedinformation that was unique to Mexican culture The following data representresults similar to those obtained by Harris, Schoen, and Hensley Is there asignificant difference between the two groups? Use a two-tailed test with a ==05
Number of Errors Recalling theMexican Story
Participants from Mexico n == 20 ,M == 41 , SS == 180
Participants from the UnitedStates n == 20 , M= 69 , SS == 200
A) Test the homogeneity ofvariance assumption using the four steps
1) state hypothesis – use samealpha level as for the hypothesis test
2) define critical region
3) compute test statistic
4) make a decision
B) Do all steps in hypothesistesting for the research problem presented
Steven Schmidt (1994) conducted aseries of experiments examining the effects of humor on memory In one study,participants were given a mix of humorous and non-humorous sentences andsignificantly more humorous sentences were recalled However, Schmidt arguedthat the humorous sentences were not necessarily easier to remember, they weresimply preferred when participant had a choice between the two types ofsentence To test this argument, he switched to an independent, measures designin which one group got a set of exclusively humorous sentences and anothergroup got a set of exclusively nonhumorous sentences The following data aresimilar to the results from the independent, measures study
Humorous Sentences
4 5 2 4
6 7 6 6
2 5 4 3
3 3 5 3
Nonhumorous Sentences
6 3 5 3
3 4 2 6
4 3 4 4
5 2 6 4
Use SPSS only to calculate teststatistic Do all
in hypothesis testing Turn indata file along with output
People’s handshakes seem to beralted to other aspects of their personalities For example, a firm a handshakeis negatively related to shyness To measure the magnitude of this effect, aresearcher obtained a sample of n=12 people who were rated as having firmhandshakes and n=8 who were rated as having weak handshakes both groups had 50% males and 50 % females Each individual was given apersonality test measuringshyness The average score for the firm handshake group was m=43 with SS=1170and the average for the wak handshake group was M=61 with SS=990 Use thesample data to estimate how much difference there is in shyness between peoplewith firm handshakes and people with weak handsahkes Make a point estimate anda 95% confidence intrval estimate