Statistics
Respond to items 1 through 4.
1. Let’s review the statement made by an auxiliary police officer aide from a previous week’s assignment: “Football games bring out the worst tendencies in people. Each time there is a local pro football game, our domestic violence calls increase dramatically. Also we see big increases in our disorderly conduct and resisting arrests complaints.” Now let’s assume that he’s right (this may or may not be the case in reality) and there really are more complaints on “football days”. Explain the type of relationship that would exist between complaints and football days.
2. Briefly describe an administrative decision made at your workplace or a social policy decision. Then give a hypotheses set for your scenario.
3. A classic “rat-researcher” is testing the effects of alcohol on rats’ abilities to run mazes. Each morning he enters his lab, opens up the top lid of his rat cage, and closing his eyes so he is not able to see which rat he finds, he reaches in a grabs the first six rats he touches. He then runs these rats through the mazes. In the write-up of his study he states that he “randomly chose rats for each morning’s maze trial.” Upon submitting his work for publication, one of the journal reviewers challenges the study’s findings and recommends that the study not be published. The reviewer insists that there was “no randomization of sampling.” With whom do you agree? Explain.
4. Lets go back to the Truman-Dewey presidential election example presented in the lectures, please describe the sampling errors made in this particular poll.