Week 10 - Friday, April 10th

Announcements.

Hi class. Thank you for reading these words that I wrote. Does it sound like me? Can you make the voice sound like Mickey Mouse? Amazing either way. I can almost imagine speaking these words in our classroom; every seat full and the wifi is fast and our broken VGA and HDMI cables have been replaced by Chancellor Rich Lyons himself (smiling; a public servant).

Anyway, hope y’all are enjoying the week off. For this week, please complete the following :

  1. Complete this Check-In. Your thoughts on the R Exam and Final Project and rest of the semester.
  2. Watch the three videos below. (Or just the first video would probably be fine.)
  3. Read Chapter 8 and take the Reading Quiz. We back.
  4. Submit Milestone #4. You will be exporting your Final Project data from Google Forms, getting it into a nice & clean format that R can read, and then showing that this worked. You’ll work on this in discussion section the week of April 13th.

Class Videos

In the next part of our class, we’ll discuss how scientists use information from the individuals they studied to make a prediction about what EVERYONE is like. This can be confusing, because scientists are just making up data to guess about what people they did not study are like, and often do so in confusing and misleading ways. But the good news is doing this in R is very easy, and you will learn, and we will review in class.

The Problem of Sampling and NHST [20 min]

Focus on the difference between making predictions from our sample and the population, the difference between sampling error and bias, and get a quick(ish) overview of one (confusing) way we try to estimate sampling error called Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST). The p-value and “significance” stuff you may remember from another stats class.

More on Sampling Bias

Professor discusses critical questions to consider when evaluating whether a sample is biased for those who want to learn more.

More on Sampling Error

A 12-minute video focusing more on “sampling error” if you are interested, why researchers should care about it, and how it can be reduced.

An Optional Reading.

“A WEIRD View of Human Nature”. A short and classic article that describes how most psychologists get samples for their studies. Focus on : the definition of WEIRD, how frequently psychologists conduct cross-cultural research, how different types of results in psychology differ depending on culture.