BRED, Assignment 1

Vanshpreet S Kohli, 2020114014

1. Inter-rater agreement
The Cohen’s Kappa agreement score between A and B is satisfactory (0.67), indicating that when
assessing the aggressiveness of participants, raters A and B tend to assign similar ratings to the same
participants. However, A Cohen’s Kappa score below 0.1 between raters A and C (0.031), as well as B and
C (0.059) indicates that C tends to disagree significantly with A as well as B which could indicate differing
perceptions of participant aggressiveness.

2. Internal Consistency
Cronbach's Alpha is a suitable measure for internal consistency in this case because it assesses the
reliability of Likert scale questionnaire items across multiple constructs, ensuring that items within each
construct consistently measure the same underlying trait.

• Score for Fantasy: 0.77

• Score for Empathetic concern: 0.81

• Score for Perspective taking: 0.74

• Score for Personal Distress: 0.77

As shown here, all the internal consistency scores are satisfactorily high (>0.7), indicating an acceptable
level of internal consistency.

3. Questionnaire flaws
a) Hypothetical questions

• It is inadvisable, especially for a feebdack form, to place customers in scenarios (such as “If you
were to buy a product from our store, how likely would you be to recommend it to your friends”)
and make inferences out of such responses.

b) Taxing memory

• People are shown to be very likely to misremenber events and numbers, and it is thus a bad
practice to ask them how many times they visited the store (the form even explicitly asks them to
guess – “If you can't remember, please guess.”)

c) Double/triple negatives

• “Don’t you think our prices are not unreasonable” – double negatives can confuse people, and
this is worsened by the “Don’t” which adds a negation and makes it sound as though validation is
being sought.

d) Loaded questions, validation seeking

 • Some questions seem manipulative, such as “prices are competitive, right”, “produce section,
which is the best in town”, “excellent service and friendly staff”, where the consumer might not
agree with the loaded element in questions.

4. Sampling
a) A stratified random sampling strategy is suitable for this medical research study. It aligns with the
goals of collecting data from different age groups and regions across the country. This method
ensures that each stratum (age group and region) is represented in the sample, providing a more
representative and balanced dataset. It helps mitigate the risk of selection bias and allows for
meaningful comparisons between subgroups.

b) For the manufacturing company's quality assessment of its products, a random sampling strategy
would be appropriate. This strategy aligns with the experiment's goal of ensuring the sampled items
are representative of the entire production process. It is cost-effective, and this approach helps
avoid potential bias and provides a fair representation of the overall product quality. It allows for a
statistically sound assessment of quality across the entire production process.

c) A stratified random sampling strategy is the most suitable approach for the college's satisfaction
survey. This strategy aligns with the goal of collecting feedback from students of different academic
batches. By dividing the student population into strata based on academic majors and years of study,
and then randomly sampling within each stratum, you ensure that each subgroup is represented in
the survey. This approach allows for a more comprehensive understanding of satisfaction levels
across various demographics, making the results more representative and useful for the college
administration.

d) The customers can be split into clusters, either geographically or based on, say, spending habits. A
number of participants can be sampled at random from each cluster, which ought to be a good and
useful representation of all the customers without having to sample from too many customers.