You work for the school newspaper. Your editor approaches you with a special reporting assignment. Your task is to write an article that describes the “typical” student at your school, complete with supporting information. To write this article, you have to survey at least 40 students and ask them to respond to a questionnaire. The editor would like to have at least two qualitative and two quantitative variables that describe the typical student. The results of the survey will be presented in your article, but you are unsure whether you should present tabular or graphical summaries, so you decide to perform the following experiment.
1. Develop a questionnaire that results in obtaining the values of two qualitative and two quantitative variables. Administer the questionnaire to at least 40 students on your campus.
2. Summarize the data in both tabular and graphical form.
3. Select 20 individuals. (They don’t have to be students at your school.) Give the tabular summaries to 10 individuals and the graphical summaries to the other 10. Ask each individual to study the table or graph for 5 seconds. After 1 minute, give a questionnaire that asks various questions regarding the information contained in the table or graph. For example, if you summarize age data, ask the individual which age group has the highest frequency. Record the number of correct answers for each individual. Which summary results in a higher percentage of correct answers, the tables or the graphs? Write a report that discusses your findings.
4. Now use the data collected from the questionnaire to create some misleading graphs. Again, select 20 individuals. Give 10 individuals the misleading graphs and 10 individuals the correct graphs. Ask each individual to study each graph for 5 seconds. After 1 minute has elapsed, give a questionnaire that asks various questions regarding the information contained in the graphs. Record the number of correct answers for each individual. Did the misleading graphs mislead? Write a report that discusses your findings.