Ch4 | Complete Test Bank – Using Descriptive Statistics To

Chapter 4: Using Descriptive Statistics to Describe Your Study Sample

Test Bank

Multiple Choice

1. When you report only on the number of clients served and the average time of service provided to these clients in your agency, you are conducting:

a. an evaluative study

b. an explanatory study

c. a correlational study

d. a descriptive study

Cognitive Domain: Application

Answer Location: Using Descriptive Statistics to Describe Your Study Sample

Difficulty Level: Medium

2. Reporting range, proportion, mean, mode, and median constitute:

a. inferential statistics

b. qualitative exploratory knowledge

c. descriptive statistics

d. correlational statistic

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Using Descriptive Statistics to Describe Your Study Sample

Difficulty Level: Medium

3. The purpose of the study, to a large extent, determines the client characteristics you most need to describe. But you are normally expected to report on:

a. the sources of referral for the clients who participated in your study

b. certain basic demographic variables such as gender, age, and race.

c. the responses of the clients to the treatment

d. the relationships between the clients

Cognitive Domain: Application

Answer Location: Deciding What Variables to Describe

Difficulty Level: Medium

4. Case level data implies that:

a. you have data on each of the variables of your study for each subject in your study

b. you have information only on certain variables for few subjects only

c. you have information on all variables for few subjects only

d. you have mostly missing data

Cognitive Domain: Application

Answer Location: Case-Level Data

Difficulty Level: Medium

5. When you code the variable of religious affiliation, and when you assign codes such as Muslims = 3, Christians = 2, and Buddhists = 3, these codes are assigned:

a. to assert that Muslims are in a higher order than Christians

b. to say that Muslims have three times the value of Buddhists

c. to distinguish the people in your study in regard to religious affiliation

d. to treat this variable as though it were measured at the interval level

Cognitive Domain: Application

Answer Location: Levels of Measurement

Difficulty Level: Medium

6. Testing a hypothesis is a domain of:

a. descriptive statistics

b. both descriptive and inferential statistics

c. qualitative analysis

d. inferential statistics

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

7. Descriptive statistics relate to:

a. the study sample

b. the service providers

c. the community at large

d. the population from which the sample was drawn

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

8. The need to use inferential statistics is because:

a. we want to estimate the likelihood that our data are relevant to the sample

b. we want to describe the relationships between the subjects in the sample

c. we want to estimate the likelihood that our data are relevant to people not in our study sample

d. we want to summarize the variables

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

9. In general, with regard to parametric and nonparametric statistics:

a. parametric statistics are used when the variable is measured at the nominal level

b. non-parametric statistics are used to nominal and ordinal data

c. parametric statistics are used when the variable is not measured at the interval level

b. non-parametric statistics are used when the variable is measured at the interval level

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

10. With regard to the pie chart:

a. it is not useful when the number of categories is small

b. it is useful when there are categories that are dramatically smaller proportion of the whole than the others

c. it is easy to make sense of a pie chart with less categories

d. it is a good visual representation when it has small slices of the pie that they cannot be seen

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Proportions and the Pie Chart

Difficulty Level: Easy

11. The cumulative frequency is:

a. the number of people in a given category plus the number who are in the categories that come before this category in the ordinal hierarchy

b. it is the number of people who are in the categories that come before this category in the ordinal hierarchy.

c. the proportion of the total sample who are in a given category for the ordinal variable

d. the number of people in a given category plus the number who are in the categories that come before this category in the ordinal hierarchy

Cognitive Domain: Application

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics for Ordinal Variables—Cumulative Frequencies and Cumulative

Difficulty Level: Difficult

True/False

1. A variable is something that is constant.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Deciding what variables to describe

Difficulty Level: Easy

2. It is important to know the level of measurement because different statistical tests make the assumption that the variables in the analysis are measured at a given level.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Levels of Measurement

Difficulty Level: Easy

3. Variables like gender and ethnicity have categories but are not recorded in any way that is numerical in nature and yet central tendencies like mean can be computed.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Levels of Measurement

Difficulty Level: Easy

4. You can compute the average for variables such as age when measured in actual number of years.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Levels of Measurement

Difficulty Level: Easy

5. A researcher cannot treat a nominal variable as though it is measured at the ordinal level.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Levels of Measurement

Difficulty Level: Easy

6. Descriptive statistics include frequencies, proportions, range, mean, median, and standard deviation.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Deciding What Statistics to Report About Your Study Subjects

Difficulty Level: Easy

7. The value of p helps us determine the probability that our data can be explained just by chance.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

8. We have to deal with statistical significance when we do not compare our sample to other people because we are not making any inferences about the ways in which our sample is or not different from a larger population of sample from which our sample was drawn.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

9. One of the assumptions of parametric statistics is that the data are not normally distributed.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

10. Non-parametric statistics do not make the assumption that the data are normally distributed.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics

Difficulty Level: Moderate

11. In addition to reporting on frequencies and proportions, you can also report the median to a variable measured at the ordinal level.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Some Common Descriptive Statistics

Difficulty Level: Easy

12. Percentages for nominal variables can be displayed graphically in a bar chart, which illustrates the percentages for each category of a nominal variable.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Using Descriptive Statistics to Describe

Difficulty Level: Easy

13. The proportion is not the percent of people in a category of a nominal variable.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Proportions and the Pie Chart

Difficulty Level: Easy

14. It is customary to report detailed data in tables.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Proportions and the Pie Chart

Difficulty Level: Easy

15. The proportions for each category of a nominal variable cannot be displayed in a pie chart.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Proportions and the Pie Chart

Difficulty Level: Easy

16. The median is the last value when all values are organized from lowest to highest.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Median

Difficulty Level: Easy

17. The median is much more likely to be reported for a variable measured at the interval level than the ordinal.

Cognitive Domain: Knowledge

Answer Location: Median

Difficulty Level: Easy

18. The reason for reporting median income rather than mean income is the possibility of a small number of people in the study who may have very high salaries—thus leading to reporting a higher mean salary that it actually is. Median is not affected by extreme values on either end of the distribution.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Median

Difficulty Level: Medium

19. It makes sense to display the frequencies of an ordinal variable as a histogram because it visually shows the order of the categories of the variable.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Histogram

Difficulty Level: Moderate

Short Answer

1. Describe what variance is and discuss the importance of reporting standard deviation when you report the mean score on any interval level variable.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Variance and the Normal Distribution

Difficulty Level: Difficult

2. Please explain why larger the sample size, the closer the distribution gets to being normal.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Variance and the Normal Distribution

Difficulty Level: Difficult

3. The author of your textbook states the following: “When your data fail to be normally distributed, it will not show the pattern of the bell curve.” Please explain.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: Variance and the Normal Distribution

Difficulty Level: Difficult

Essay

1. Explain the importance of normal distribution for parametric statistics.

2. What is standard deviation? Please provide an example to discuss its use and relevance in human services evaluation.

Cognitive Domain: Comprehension

Answer Location: The Standard Deviation and the Average Deviation

Difficulty Level: Difficult