EPA MCQ Flashcards
What is the research process?
Identify variables, generate hypotheses, measure variables, analyse data
What is a sample?
A smaller but representative selection from the population used to make inferences about the population
What is the mean?
The sum of all scores divided by the number of scores, it is the value from which the scores deviate least (it has the least error) the mean could be represented as “Outcome + (Model) + Error”
How can we asses how well the mean represents reality?
Calculate error, the deviation between the mean and an actual data point.
What is the sum of squared errors?
It is when you find the deviation for each data point, square each vale (so they don’t cancel out by being +/-) and add them together
What is variance?
The sum of squares divided by the number of scores (to give an average)
What are degrees of freedom?
It is the maximum number of scores in a final calculation which can vary.
What is standard deviation?
The square root of variance. It shows how far away from the mean most data points are, it can be small or large around the same mean and make the graphs look different.
What is normally distributed data?
The mean, median and mode are all the same value, distribution is symmetrical around the mean, 99.7% of data falls within 3 standard deviations of the mean
What two tyles of skews are there?
Positive (towards the left) and negative (towards the right)
Two types of kurtosis?
Leptokurtic (pointy), platykurtic (round)
What is a Z score?
(Score-mean score)/ standard deviation. It is the umber of standard deviations away from the mean.
What are confidence intervals?
The boundaries in which we think the true population lies (this is different from simply the mean due to sampling variation)
What does a 95% confidence interval mean?
95% of the time the true mean will lie within the interval
What does a test statistic actually show?
Test statistic = variance explained by the model/variance not explained by the model = effect/error
What does the t-test show?
Difference in means(explained variance) / standard error (unexplained variance)
Type I vs type II errors
Type I = occurs when we think there is a genuine effect when in fact there isn’t (probability is alpha level) Type II = occurs when we thing there is no effect when in reality there is (probability is the beta level)
Issues with p-values
They are tied to sample size and so are not standardized.
What is an effect size?
A standardized measure of the size of an effect, the magnitude of the effect (e.g. eta2 etc.)
how do we determine if data is normally distributed?
Look at Zskew and Zkurtosis (statistic/standard error of statistic). If the score is +/-2 then the data is not normal.
What can you do with outliers?
Remove them. Transform the data.
What are the three types of data?
nominal (categories) Ordinal (ordered but with no true 0) continuous (numbers with a true 0)
Why can’t we just run lots of T-tests instead of an Anova?
Type I and II errors could be made. Due to the alpha level of .05
What is an anova?
An analysis of variance. Test statistic that lets us test if three or more sample means come from the same population.
What must be true to do an anova?
Data must be interval or ratio, sample distribution must be normal, there must be homogeneity of variance
What is homogeneity of variance?
Where the variance in each sample is equal (rather than one sample being really spread out and the others being almost identical)
Which test of homogeneity should I use?
Between design – Levenes, within design – Mauchly
Why do we have to do planned comparisons/post hocs with an anova?
Anovas produce an overall test statistic rather than specific information about each group/level of the data.
What do anovas actually do?
Compare the variance within groups to the variance between to show whether a difference in score sis due to the independent variable.
What type score do we want for a test of sphericity?
If the score is above .05 it means the assumption of homogeneity has not been violated, therefore we have homogeneity.
What corrections can be made to sphericity tests?
If greenhouse-geisser is smaller than .75 we make a G-G correction. If G-G is bigger than .75 we make a H-F correction. We make these corrections by reading different lines on the output from jamovi
How to report an anova result
F(DF for first variable, DF for second variable)=Fvalue, p=pvalue, eta squared or partial= value