Reading Check #1

A librarian at a university is interested in looking at how undergraduate students use the library resources. He sends a survey about the library usage to all undergraduate students in the college but receives responses from only a subset of students. In this example, the librarian was interested in getting information from the ______________, but could obtain only a _____________.

Population, sample

Is children's vocabulary related to their parents' education level? To answer this, researchers measured the number of words 3-year-old children knew, and their parents education (in number of years). This data can be examined using:

correlational method

A librarian at a university is interested in looking at how many undergraduate students use the library. He records student use of different library resources and tabulates this usage. This information is best an example of

descriptive statistics

Randomly assigning study participants to the groups based on the manipulation of the independent variable is necessary in the:

experimental design

Descriptive statistics can help to infer the unknown parameters in a population.

false

Airline passengers were identified by the country of the origin of their flight (e.g., India, China, Korea). This data would be an example of data measured on the ______ level of measurement.

nominal

UD releases a report that indicates the race/ethnicity data of all undergraduate students enrolled each year. White students make up 75.8%, followed by Hispanic students at 6.8%, African-American students at 4.9%, and Asian students at 4.3%. This data for this variable was measured using the ______ level of measurement.

nominal

Listeners to a specific radio station were asked to sort one hundred songs from least popular to the most popular. The songs' popularity scores were then published, and shows use of a

ordinal scale

A researcher studies the development of cognitive flexibility by testing children of different age groups on a problem-solving task. This is an example of a:

quasi-experimental design

Random assignment is not possible in a quasi-experiment because the variables being studied cannot be manipulated.

true

Variables on the ratio scale could be either continuous or discrete.

true

A continuous variable is measured along a continuum at any place beyond the decimal point, and can be positive (e.g., height) or negative (e.g., temperature) in value.

true