Hi Everyone
Well, we are down to the home stretch. And I know that you are all feeling the pressure. Continue to stay focused on the goal and you will do fine. Please remember to continue to work on your research papers and presentations so that all you have remaining is to fill in your data analysis, resullts and conclusions.
This week we covered the beginning of hypothesis testing. We began by introducing the t-distribution. We discussed why we need to use the t-distribution and how to use the t-tables. We introduced the concept of degrees of freedom "df = n-1" (don't forget to subtract the 1) and the idea of one and two-tail tests and how that affects the way we read the t-table. We discussed different conditions on sample sizes and when one would use t-tables vs. z-tables.
Next we introduced the idea of hypothesis testing and looked at some examples of how it would be used to test some of the hypotheses that we were working on in our class projects. We looked at how the idea of the confidence interval could be used in our hypothesis testing and showed how hypothesis testing was simply looking at whether or not our null hypothesis assumption fell inside or outside of our confidence interval.
Please make sure to read the SPSS manual chapters and re-read the chapter in the book. We will do more examples next time and we will conclude with looking at chi-squared testing.
Tarynn
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