Hypothesis Testing and Confidence Interval
It is possible to test a hypothesis that has only one variable (despite the fact that no SPSS command facilitates testing of one-variable hypotheses). There are tests such as one sample t-test, which require only one variable to perform the hypothesis test.
1. Using hypothesis testing and the confidence interval of a single variable, please explain the relationship between sample statistics and population parameters.
The sample statistics are numerical summaries of the data obtained from a sample while the population parameters perform a similar function for the entire population. When we perform a hypothesis testing, we use the sample statistics and compute the confidence intervals, which is a reasonable range of numbers in which the population parameter is likely to occur.
2. What are some differences between hypothesis testing and the confidence interval?
The confidence interval is purely computed to give a likely range of numbers in which the population parameter is likely to be found. Hypothesis testing is performed to test a specific hypothesis about a population using a sample and its data.
Two-variable Hypothesis Test
3. What tests, specifically, should be used with hypotheses having two variables?
For tests such as independent samples t-test, one way ANOVA, chi square test of independence we require two variables.
4. Please provide one example of a hypothesis with which either an independent-sample t-test or an analysis of variance would be equally useful.
For a hypothesis test with only two groups, either an independent samples t-test or an ANOVA is useful.For example, we have two groups of students, one who is pursuing a major in Engineering and the other group is majoring in Economics. We want to compare the time taken by the two groups to solve a Sudoku can be compared either using an independent samples t-test or an ANOVA
Analyzing Data Using SPSS
5. Please describe the process for deploying SPSS to analyze the data.
In SPSS, we can analyze the data using various such as descriptive analysis, hypothesis tests etc. These can be found under the analysis tab on the tool bar.