[SOLVED] Statistical Procedures

Psychological Methods: Statistical Procedures
Statistics in the News Project

Fall 2021
General Overview
This assignment is meant to help you recognize and critically evaluate statistics when they are presented to you in life. Specifically, this assignment will focus on your ability to recognize and evaluate statistics presented in the news. Because the goal of this project is for you to evaluate how statistics are used in the news, you should ONLY use information provided in the newspaper article and you should NOT use the original research article. After all, you most likely wouldn’t read the research article behind every article you read.
Paper Format
The news article critiques need to be written in APA format. Here are some helpful resources for APA formatting:
The Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL)
Psychology Writing Center Writing Guides from the University of Washington.
Guidelines for Your Critique
These are general guidelines and are meant to guide you, not dictate your project. You should follow these guidelines and feel free to include additional sections as needed for clarity. Please be concise and do not ramble.
⦁ Papers should be 2-3 pages long, double-spaced, in APA format. This page limit does NOT include your title page or reference page. If you have questions about APA style, see the links above as well as a helpful reference sheet in the files section. A large portion of your grade (10%) will be based on APA format.
⦁ You should be writing about the news article only, do not find or use the original research article.
⦁ You should not quote from the newspaper article. Use your own words and be careful to ensure that plagiarism does not occur. Do not take the news paper article report and only change a couple of words. This project requires you to summarize in your own words.
⦁ Your news article MUST come from one of the following sources AND be from this semester (Source must be after September 2021):
⦁ ABC News
⦁ BBC News
⦁ CNN
⦁ Daily Mail UK
⦁ Fox News
⦁ NBC
⦁ New York Times
⦁ Times
⦁ Washington Post
⦁ USA Today
⦁ Huffington Post
⦁ Los Angeles Times
⦁ Your paper must include the following sections and answers to the following questions (you may use APA headings if you’d like):
⦁ Title Page (see APA resources)
⦁ Title of your paper: A Critique of “______” (name of your article)
⦁ Summary (this should be a majority of the paper)
⦁ Introduce the article topic
⦁ Identify what the articles goal appeared to be
⦁ Identify the research question or hypothesis
⦁ How was the study designed?
⦁ What were the independent/dependent variables?
⦁ What extraneous variables could be present?
⦁ Who was the population?
⦁ Who was in the sample?
⦁ How were variables operationalized (how were they measured)?
⦁ What descriptive statistics were presented or implied?
⦁ What inferences are being presented or implied?
⦁ What inferential statistics would be necessary to back up the claims made in the article?
⦁ In brief, what conclusion did the author of the article draw?
⦁ Do the conclusions seem justified? Why or why not?
⦁ What are the pros and cons of this analytic approach?
⦁ More things possible!
*If the article does not explicitly identify the things listed above, you are responsible for 1) inferring what you think it is given the limited information and explaining how you made that inference and/or 2) state what would have been appropriate given the question of interest
⦁ Discuss what the article did well
⦁ Can include analysis of theory building, design, sampling, measurement, selection of statistics, interpretation, accomplishing journalist’s goals
⦁ Discuss what the article did not do well
⦁ References (see APA resources for proper formatting) Statistical Procedures Statistical Procedures Statistical Procedures