HYPOTHESIS TESTING

 How do you compare apples and

oranges?
 Are you as good a student of French as
you are in Physics?
 How many people did better or worse
than you on a test?
 Are you abnormal or deviant?
 Should you ask your professor to curve
the exam?
 Each of these questions suggests a
comparison. Sometimes when you
analyze data, you will need to compare
scores within a sample (are you
abnormal or deviant?) or across
variables (as good in French as
Physics). To do so effectively, you will
need to present the comparisons in a
way that facilitates decision making.
 You may be asked:
 What percentage of people falls below
a given score?
 What is the relative standing of a score
in one distribution versus another?
 What score or scores can be used to
define an extreme or deviant situation?
 You can do all of these with the Z-
Score!
 You enter your dorm room and find that one of your
roommates has a happy face, but your other roommate is sad:

 What's happened! Why are you so happy?

 Hurray, I got a 60 on the Physics test!!!

They have the same score!

Why the different reactions?
 And why are you so sad?
 Wah!, I got a 60 on the French test!!!
 So what does this have to do with the French and Physics
tests?

The Big Idea!

Where you are relative to others in the distribution
determines how well you did.

 Now that you can see the distributions of test scores, explain
why your roommates are happy and sad.
 Now we can quantify your place in a
distribution. You don't have to always draw a
picture. We will do this with the Z-Score.
 Formula:

 where: x = individual score

x = sample mean
SD = sample standard deviation
 When analyzing data, you may have to
decide if a sample mean is different
from a hypothesized population mean.
 To do this, you must have
measurement data, calculate the mean
and standard deviation for your
sample, and know something about the
population.
 For example:
 You hear that the average person sleeps 8 hours a day.
You think college students sleep less. You ask 20
college kids how long they sleep on an average day.
You get the data and the mean sleep time is 6.5 hours.
 Is this luck? Did you happen to pick a group of light
sleepers by chance? Or do college kids really sleep
less?
 What you are asking is whether college kids come
from a population separate from the rest of society.
"Society" supposedly is all the people who contributed
to the mean of 8 hours a night that we hear about.
 In the process of doing research, you may have to
decide if two groups are different. To do this, you
must have measured data and calculate the mean
and standard deviation for each of the groups. For
example:
 Do men and women perform differently on a test of
spatial ability?
 Does one drug treat headache pain more effectively
than another?
 Do College Juniors sleep more than College Seniors?
 So far, we have not mentioned how the groups are
chosen. There are two choices:
 Independent Groups - Each group is randomly
selected with separate people in each group.

 Repeated Groups, Within Subjects, Matched Groups -

The same folks are tested twice. You use identical
twins. People are pretested and paired on some
characteristic.
 Here's the reason to do one versus the other:
Independent Groups:
It is easy to find subjects. It is the only design that works when
you use variables such as Gender - you can't change men into
women and vice versa for the second trial.

Repeated Groups:
Fewer subjects are needed.
More statistical power because:
 These designs reduce experimental error as you reduce the
chance that you randomly select wildly different kinds of
individuals for each group.
 Technically, you subtract a covariance term in the standard
error and make it smaller. Thus, you get a bigger t-ratio and
this makes it more likely that you will get significance.
 Find out if ANY groups in a set larger than two differ
significantly from each other. As data analysts, you may have to
find out if any groups in a set of 3 or more groups differ from
each other. To do this, you must have measurement data and
calculate the mean and standard deviation for each of the
groups in the study. In one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA),
you can ask three types of questions:
 Do ANY of the groups differ significantly from each other?
The F-ratio will tell us this!
 Which specific groups differ?
Comparison Techniques will tell us this!
 Are the differences relatively big or small?
Measures of Explained Variance will tell us this!
 Here's the issue in a nutshell:
 You have an independent variable,
which defines your groups.
 You have three or more groups so
defined.
 Which groups differ from each other?
There are a lot of possible pairs if you
have more than two groups.
 All of the inferential statistics that we
have learned require measurement
data. We often have questions, though,
about classifications or categories. The
chi-square statistic allows us to test
hypotheses using nominal or
categorical data.

Great news! There are only two big

ideas in chi-square!
 How Do You Say Chi-Square!
Many people embarrass themselves by
saying CHEE - Square.
Ha Ha - you will be laughed at!

The following illustration will give you the correct

pronunciation! It's like the beginning of KITE.
 It's All About Whether or Not
Proportions Differ

Chi-square is an incredibly useful

statistic. What it does is test whether
one set of proportions is different from
another. It does this by comparing
frequencies.
 At some point in your career as a data analyst you
may be asked to describe the association between
variables or to predict one variable from another.
Statistical techniques called correlation and linear
regression allow us to do this.

The purpose of Pearson's Correlation Coefficient is

to indicate a linear relationship between two
measurement variables. This means that if you have
two sets of scores, you want to know: Does one score
predict another?
 For example:
 Do your combined SAT scores predict your college GPA?
Or why bother to take the SATs?
 Does stress predict how well you will do on an exam or other
cognitive task?
Might be good to know for people who have stressful jobs. Let's
yell at our computer programmers more - then we'll get some
good bugfree code.
 Does a baby's birth weight predict how many colds it will have
in infancy?
Doctors and parents might want to know this.
In all these cases, you want to know if one score is high, is the
other also high? If one is low, is the other also low?