What are your results?

Jeffrey Barnes
Chapter 9

Now what?

Once you have finished collecting the data

you are faced with the challenge of
making sense of them.
You designed your survey to test your
hypothesis - now you need to find out if
the results support it or not.
Next steps

Organize
Summarize
Present and then
Analyze

Quantitative Data

If you have 20 questionnaires filled out

and each one has 20 questions then you
are looking at 400 bits of information.
This is too much to look at casually and
find patterns and relationships among the
bits at a glance.
The first step is to organize your raw
data

Raw data are figures and information that have

not yet been summarized or interpreted

Organizing the information

The is a great range of computer

software available
Spreadsheet

package - Excel
Statistical packages - Minitab, SPSS
More complicated statistical packages
SAS

Coding (quantitative data)

First step in data analysis is to code or

translate the primary data from their raw
form into forms that can be conveniently
analyzed and managed.
Coding involves using a set of rules to
regroup the data into categories identified
by numbers.
You should code only answers to close
ended data

Coding Examples

What gender are you?

Male
Female
Transgender
In

1
2
3

this case males are coded 1 and

females are coded as 2

Coding Examples

What kind of music do you like?

Rock
Jazz
Classical
Country
Other
No answer

1
2
3
4
5
9

If you gave your respondents these choices

then it is easy to code. If you left space for
them to tell you then you might have many
different categories, you must then choose the
categories and code accordingly.

Data Summary

You must create a data summary

sheet with Excel
This will help organizing
It will also help with calculation of
numeric data
Mean
Standard

deviation

Average
Create

charts

Univariate Analysis

Summarizing and analysis of one variable

Percentage distribution

The percentage of respondents who answered in a

particular way

Example:

you have 20 respondents

You asked them if they smoked (coded yes 1 no 2)
15 of them answered yes (1)
75% of respondents smoke

Frequency Distribution

The number of respondents for each category

Example:

f= 15

Levels of Measurement:
Nominal
Scale

Not all data

that you collect is measured

in the same way.

Nominal Scale

A list of categories to which objects can be

classified. Nominal measurement organizes
data into groups or categories that are
mutually exclusive.
Example:
Sex [male or female]
Type of music listened to [jazz, rock, classical,
other]

Ordinal Scale

A measurement scale that assigns values

to objects based on their ranking with
respect to one another. You can divide
answers into categories BUT you can also
rank the categories (in comparison to
each other)
Example: Answer to following question:

Smoking is dangerous to your health (strongly

Agree Agree- Neutral Disagree- Strongly
Dissagree)

Interval Scale

A measurement scale in which a certain

distance along the scale means the same
thing no matter where on the scale you
are, but where "0" on the scale does not
represent the absence of the thing being
measured.
Examples:

Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature scales.

Ratio Scale (another interval)

A measurement scale in which a certain distance

along the scale means the same thing no matter
where on the scale you are, and where "0" on the
scale represents the absence of the thing being
measured. Thus a "4" on such a scale implies twice
as much of the thing being measured as a "2."
Example: Approximate Household income ( round
from 0.5)

$0
$10,000
$20,000
$30,000
$40,000

Measures of Central Tendency

The term central tendency refers to

the middle value or perhaps a
typical value of the data.
Number that summarizes certain
information about the data.
It is measured using the means,
median or mode.

The MODE

The most frequent value in a distribution.

Example:

In the data set [1,1,1,2,4,3]

The mode is equal to 1

A data set can have more than one mode

Example:

In the data set [1,1, 3,3, 4]

The mode is 1 and 3

The Median

The middle point in the frequency distribution. It

is the point at which half of of the scores are
above and half are below
It is described as the number separating the
higher half of a sample from the lower half.
The median of a finite list of numbers can be
found by arranging all the observations from
lowest value to highest value and picking the
middle one.
It is used to determine the typical value.

The Mean

This is what is commonly known as

the average.
Calculated by adding all the values
of the distribution and then dividing
by the total number of values.
Mean =X
N