W6

Specifically, be sure to address the following critical elements: Address the below responses in title Week 2 Assignment utilizing question and responses from title Week 6-Week 2 Assignment and make sure to include the following.

I. Methods

a. Outline the study participants. How many participants were there, and how were they recruited?

b. Describe the materials (surveys, etc.) you created for the study and how they specifically address the research question. Also, consider how the materials appropriately consider the participants.

c. Describe the methodological procedures used to collect the data. How were the materials used to collect the data?

II. Results

a. Describe how your raw data was reduced for statistical analysis, clearly detailing each step.

b. Create a table outlining the descriptive statistics for your key variables.

c. Describe the statistical test you selected, and explain why this test is the most appropriate for analyzing your data compared to other tests you could have used (including why other tests were inappropriate for analyzing the data).

d. Communicate your research findings in a professional way, as outlined by the American Psychological Association’s study standards.

What to Submit

Your submission must adhere to standard formatting (Times New Roman, 12-point font, one-inch margins), using the most recent version of the APA style manual for citations.

Now that you have completed your data collection, it is important to revise your Methods section so it accurately reflects the participants, materials, and methodological procedures used in your study.

In your Results section, you should first describe how you reduced your raw data for analysis (e.g., how your questionnaires were summed or averaged to get a composite score to analyze). Your Results section should also include a table of the relevant descriptive statistics and a narrative explanation of the descriptive statistics. Then you should describe the statistical test you chose to run and explain the test findings. It is essential that you follow APA manuscript standards when writing this section. Please refer to Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 7 of your APA manual for further instructions on how best to write a Methods and Results section.

Submit your assignment here. Make sure you’ve included all the required elements by reviewing the guidelines and rubric.

Important Tips: Raw Data

Remember that raw data refers to how you reduced your data for analysis.

· Suppose you have response categories of strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree. Your data analysis would be stronger with fewer categories, so you may want to reduce your data to disagree, neutral, and agree. You would recode your variables in a case like this one. Or you might find that in the race variable, you have 3 Black, 3 white, 1 Pacific Islander, 1 Native American, 1 Asian, 1 biracial, and 1 other. Since you have so few participants in five of those categories, your data might be more meaningfully recoded into Black, white, and other.

· Sometimes you’ll need to recode your scale as instructed by the survey scoring guide information.

· Surveys often have items that require recoding from negative to positive or vice versa.

· You may not need to recode variables. However, do not skip this critical element. If you do not need to recode variables, tell the reader that the raw data was not reduced for statistical analysis. This way, you show that you clearly understand the meaning and address the critical element.

Important Tips: Descriptive Statistics

· Begin your analysis with descriptive statistics, an expected and beneficial approach.

· If age is given in years, you can report measures of central tendency (mean, mode, median) and measures of variability (range and SD).

· You could analyze other types of data, such as the number of siblings, pets, hours at work, hours of school, etc., in the same way.

· With nominal variables such as race or gender, you can report the percentages of respondents with a particular characteristic; however, the mean of nominal level data is meaningless. For example, if your data is coded as 1 for male, 2 for female, 3 for non-binary, and 4 for other, you cannot add the number of ones and twos to obtain a mean. The number stands for the category. You can, however, say you surveyed X number of males (x%), X number of females (x%), X number of non-binary (x%), and X number of other (x%).

· Be sure to include an APA formatted table in your descriptive data.

Important Tips: Statistical Tests

· Think about your research question. What variables could help answer the question?

· You will not have the number of responses necessary to use inferential statistics. However, you will use them as part of your learning experience. This exercise is educational, and you would need a higher sample of participants in real-world data collection.

· What test will give you answers to the research question?

· The level of data you collected decides the statistical tests that are proper to use. For instance:

·

· Suppose you want to look at gender (coded as M for male, F for female, and O for other) and ask, “do you wear a mask in public?” (responses of yes or no). You may use a chi-square to explore the relationship between nominal variables in a situation like this one.

· Is your data ordinal or rank order? That would be a Spearman rank-order correlation.

· With interval or ratio data, you can examine means with t-tests (independent or dependent). For instance, you could use gender, race, or mask-wearing status (yes/no) and compare means.

· If you would like to compare means for more than two ratio or interval variables, use an ANOVA.

· If you want to predict a dependent variable using multiple independent variables, review multiple regression.

Important Tips: Manuscript Standards

Please refer to your APA manual for help with completing your milestone assignments.

Students often report that the APA has so much information that it is overwhelming. However, it will benefit you to dive into the manual because it explains how to draft the final paper. Use the following sections in particular as a guide:

· 3.6 (Quantitative Method Standards)

· 3.7 (Quantitative Results Standards)

· Participant flow

· Recruitment

· Statistics and data analysis

· Chapter 7 (Tables and Figures)

· Chapter 3 (Journal Article Reporting Standard)