1. Broadly, quantitative social science research tackles questions that can be considered descriptive, explanatory, or evaluative in nature. Which of the following is the best example of an explanatory research question?

	a.	How many US households have a legally owned firearm on the premises?
	b.	Is there an association between joining a gang and violent behavior?
	c.	Is drug testing for welfare recipients a cost-effective means of reducing substance use?
	d.	Has the rate of sexual violence increased or decreased in the previous decade?

2. Phillis is a criminologist interested in police use of force. In devising a research question for her latest study, she would like to ask one with the goal of describing police use of force. Which of the following would be a good descriptive question?

	a.	How do police officers perceive the legitimacy of the citizen complaint process?
	b.	What is the prevalence of citizen injury due to force in police-citizen encounters across the United States?
	c.	What is the effect of a diversity training program on the likelihood of police to use physical force against citizens?
	d.	How does police officer education influence willingness to use physical force against citizens?

3. At the heart of the social scientific process is the pursuit of explanatory research questions. These are research questions that are focused on...

	a.	Gaining a rich, in-depth understanding of a relativelty unknown social phenomena.
	b.	The relationship or association between social phenomena.
	c.	Estimating the precise prevalence or extent of a social phenomena.
	d.	The costs and benefits of criminal justice programs.

4.

A primary requirement for any question to be considered "scientific" is that is must be empirical. Which of the following best captures the meaning of this term?

	a.	The question must be capable of being answered through observation
	b.	The question must be common sense.
	c.	The question must be important
	d.	The question must be asked by smart, important people with lots of degrees

5. For Mike's research project, he is going to travel to different parole branch officers to survey parole agents. He is interested in how perceptions of job stress impact the agent's mental health. He will use regression to perform the analysis. In the above example, which of the following would be a variable in this scenario?

	a.	Parole agents
	b.	Perceptions of job stress
	c.	Regression analysis
	d.	Surveys

6. Susie is conducting a study in which is examining the effect of psychological disorders on dating violence among college students. In this example, dating violence represents the _____, and college students the _____.

	a.	Dependent Variable ; Independent Variable
	b.	Independent Variable ; Unit of Analysis
	c.	Dependent Variable ; Unit of Analysis
	d.	Independent Variable ; Dependent Variable

7. Jessie is conducting a study focused on examining whether incarceration rates are influenced by economic conditions in US states. In this example, economic conditions are the _____, and incarceration rates are the _____.

	a.	Dependent Variable ; Independent Variable
	b.	Independent Variable ; Dependent Variable
	c.	Dependent Variable ; Unit of Analysis
	d.	Independent Variable ; Unit of Analysis

8. Demographic variables which measure gender (i.e., male, female) and race/ethnicity (e.g., African American, Hispanic, White, Other) are examples of nominal level variables because...

	a.	They are not capable of being measured, either quantitatively or qualitatively
	b.	They have equal distance between values, and routine mathematical operations can be applied to them
	c.	They have arbitrary zero points, in which zero is just another value
	d.	They are not able to discern rank-order between categories, and there is no numeric meaning to the categories

9. Which of the following would be the best example of a ratio level variable?

	a.	A variable counting the number of speeding tickets an individual received in their lifetime
	b.	A variable measuring support for the death penalty, with values ranging from 1 to 10.
	c.	A variable measuring depression, which is combined from multiple numeric scales measuring the severity of different symptoms
	d.	A variable indicating whether a defendant's conviction was for a felony or a misdemeanor

10. Consider measures of central tendency. The _______ attempts to represent the center of a variable's distribution by acting as a balancing point for the values above and below it, while the ________ represents a variable's center by identifying the value for which 50% of the sample has a value below it and 50% has a value above it.

	a.	Mode ; Median
	b.	Median ; Mode
	c.	Mean ; Median
	d.	Median ; Mean

11. The following distribution is positively skewed, with most values relatively low in magnitude and a handful of relatively large values. For this distribution,what is most likely to be trueregarding the measures of central tendency?

	a.	The mean will be a larger value (on the x-axis) than the median.
	b.	All of the above.
	c.	The mean, median, and mode will be approximately equal.
	d.	The mode will be a larger value (on the x-axis) than the mean.

12. Relative to the mode and the median, the mean is especially susceptible to extreme values. This is because...

	a.	The mean reflects the middle value of a distribution.
	b.	All of the above.
	c.	The mean incorporates information from all values in a distribution.
	d.	The mean reflects only the most prevalent value in a distribution.

13. When a distribution is skewed (either positively or negatively), which measure of central tendency provides the most preferable indicator of central tendency?

	a.	The mean and the median are equally preferable.
	b.	The median.
	c.	The mean.
	d.	The standard deviation.

14. Which measure of dispersion represents average deviations from the mean?

	a.	The variance.
	b.	The standard deviation.
	c.	The interquartile range.
	d.	The z-score.

15. Consider a variable which measures "years of experience" among a sample of police officers. This variable has a mean of 10.8 and a standard deviation of 7.2. One officer has 15 years of experience. If we were to convert this variable into a z-score, the value for this particular officer would be...

	a.	1.119
	b.	0.000
	c.	-0.792
	d.	0.583

16. Which of the following best reflects the meaning of the Central Limit Theorem?

	a.	Non-random samples provide only a limited understanding of theory.
	b.	Measures of central tendency are central to our understanding of statistics.
	c.	Given enough sufficiently sized samples, the sampling distribution of a sample statistic will be normally distributed.
	d.	Sampling distributions of sample statistics from skewed variables will always be skewed themselves

17. Two random samples taken from the same population produce different sample distributions of a variable, and the mean/standard deviations of these sample distributions are slightly different from one another. The difference between the sample statistics estimated from these separate samples from the same population is best attributed to...

	a.	The interquartile range.
	b.	Phantasmagorical error.
	c.	Measurement error.
	d.	Sampling error.

18.

Melissa recently finished data collection on a project in which she randomly sampled US households and surveyed them on whether they kept a firearm in their household. The proportion of respondents reporting keeping a gun at home was 0.30, but Melissa also included a 95% confidence interval of 0.24 to 0.36. How would we most accurately interpret Melissa's findings?

	a.	For any randomly sampled US household, there is a 95% chance that it contains a .24 or .36 caliber handgun.
	b.	We are 95% confident that the interval 0.24 - 0.36 contains the true proportion of US households owning firearms.
	c.	There is a 95% chance that Melissa's findings are correct.
	d.	There is a 5% chance that Melissa's findings are due to sampling error.