7.3: Distributions

Question 1

Students often claim that listening to music helps them to concentrate. A psychologist was not aware of any previous research in this area. She decided to investigate this claim.

Forty students from a nearby sixth form centre volunteered to take part in her study. They each answered the following question:

‘Do you think that you concentrate on your work ‘better’, ‘worse’ or ‘the same’ if you listen to music while working?’

She obtained the results in Table 1.

Table 1:
Responses to question - ‘Do you think that you concentrate on your work ‘better’, ‘worse’ or ‘the same’ if you listen to music while working?’

Better = 22
Worse = 8
The same = 10.

In a follow-up study, the psychologist obtained a volunteer sample of 10 students aged 17 years from a different sixth form centre. Using a repeated measures design, participants were asked to complete two puzzle tasks as quickly as possible.

Task A was to find 10 differences in a ‘spot the difference’ puzzle while working in silence.

Task B was to find 10 differences in another ‘spot the difference’ puzzle while listening to music through headphones.

The tasks were counterbalanced and the time taken to complete each task was recorded for each student in a table.

Explain one reason why the mean would be the most appropriate measure of central tendency to summarise the data in a table (2 marks)

Answer 1

The mean would be the most appropriate measure of central tendency to summarise the data in a table, because