Assignment: Introduction to Quantitative Analysis: Confidence Intervals in SPSS

Walden University

According to Frankfort-Nachmias and Leon-Guerrero (2018), descriptive analysis or descriptive statistics the procedure that is used to organize and describe data that were collected from a sample or population. When using descriptive statistics, Frankfort-Nachmias and Leon-Guerrero (2018) believes the best way to organize data are in a frequency distribution which is a table that provides the number of observations that belongs into each category of the variable that is being analyzed. For this week’s assignment, we will used one categorical variable and one continuous variable to execute the appreciate descriptive analysis that will cover central tendency and variability of both variables.

Continuous Variable: Years Math Teacher Has Taught High School Math

Categorical Variable: Parent Highest Level of Education

For the categorical variable, there are six categories: less than high school, high school diploma/GED, associate’s degree, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or decorate.

Analysis of Data

The first data presented is the continuous data with the variable: years math teacher has taught high school math. For continuous data, we presented the mode, median and mean, which represents the central tendency of distribution (Wagner, 2016). As we can see the mode- the area in which the largest frequency in the distribution- is 3 years, the median- the middle of the distribution is 7.0 years and the mean -or average- is 10.14 years. Frankfort-Nachmias and Leon-Guerrero (2018) states that the standard deviation provides a measurement of variation for interval-ratio and ordinal variables which or the expected value. In this case, the standard deviation is 8.487 years which is the extent of deviation for the teachers that taught math in high school.

In examining the categorical variable, it’s great to see data that can be seen at quick glace like the level of education of each parent. According to Frankfort-Nachmias and Leon-Guerrero (2018), the measures of variability is the “numbers that describe diversity or variability in the distribution of variable” (p. 94). With the frequency distribution, we can examine the index of qualitative variation (IQV) that shows the difference in the group that is compared to the maximum number of possible difference within the same distribution (Frankfort-Nachmaias & Leon-Guerrero, 2018). In order to calculate this number, we must know the number of observed difference divided by the maximum possible difference. However, as we examine this data, we know that high school diploma or GED is the highest level of education that majority of the parents have. As a practitioner of change, this data is important because we can identify if parents with just a high school diploma encourages others to pursue a high school diploma or do they encourage others to do more.

Reference:

Wagner, W. E. (2016). Using IBM® SPSS® statistics for research methods and social science statistics (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.