A Student's Work on the Disability IAT

The student from the previous question used his random sample of 861 participants in the Disability IAT to complete the Boxplots Lab. To successfully complete the lab he needed to compare the Disability-IAT-Score for two groups from a categorical variable. He chose to work with the "Prefers" categorical variable. For the lab, he produced the following work.

Stacked Boxplots: Distribution of a IAT-Disability-Score Grouped by Prefers

Variables

Because I chose to stack the boxplots, the quantitative variable, IAT-Disabled-Score, is graphed on the horizontal axis. The categorical variable, Prefers, is graphed on the vertical axis.

Key for Prefers Labels (Vertical Axis)

Prefers
Subject reports:
1 = Strong preference for disabled people
2 = Moderate preference for disabled people
3 = Slight preference for disabled people
4 = Likes abled people and disabled people equally
5 = Slight preference for abled people
6 = Moderate preference for abled people
7 = Strong preference for abled people

Group by: Prefers

Summary Statistics for IAT-Disabled-Score

Prefers	n	Min	Q1	Median	Q3	Max
Strongly prefers disabled people	17	-0.7717603	-0.34175999	-0.16640724	0.46757936	0.69995677
Moderately prefers disabled people	21	-1.0824432	-0.11299241	0.32514437	0.54705833	1.5718736
Slightly prefers disabled people	65	-1.0494831	-0.28955621	0.16381421	0.51553278	1.3691551
No preference	560	-1.1576824	0.074357552	0.4191976	0.76375864	1.474671
Slightly prefers abled people	135	-0.64264575	0.22556505	0.55150998	0.85447185	1.3101415
Moderately prefers abled people	47	-0.42760332	0.33915022	0.62933161	0.99255436	1.4470579
Strongly prefers abled people	16	-0.56368157	0.63633898	0.84506041	0.95243112	1.5150084

Interpreting the Disability IAT

(By clicking on the "variables description" link for the Disability IAT, the student had access to the following information about interpreting Disability-IAT-Score.)

The Disability IAT measures implicit biases related to disabled persons compared to abled persons.

• More positive scores on the Disability IAT mean: A stronger association between disabled and bad OR abled and good.
• More negative scores on the Disability IAT mean: A stronger association between disabled and good OR abled and bad.

Flag question: Question 8

To answer one of the questions in the Boxplots Lab, the student needed to compare the Disability-IAT-Score for two groups of the categorical variable. He chose to compare the following groups.

• Group 1 (strong preference for disabled people)
• Group 7 (strong preference for abled people)

He did a great job in choosing these two groups for the comparison. The boxes do not overlap for these groups. This makes using percentages in the comparison much easier. However, after that he struggled with writing the comparisons.

First he needed to describe the distribution of Disability-IAT-Scores for Group 1. Then he needed to describe the distribution of Disability-IAT-Scores for Group 7. After that he needed to compare the two distributions. The following statements do not form a complete comparison. Nevertheless, which of the statements should have been included in his comparison? 

Group of answer choices

A) The median IAT score for each group represents the typical implicit attitude toward abled/disabled people.

B) The median IAT score for the group with a strong preference for disabled people does not align with the the group's stated (explicit) preference for abled or disabled people.

C) We see that 75% of the group with a stated strong preference for the abled people (Group 7) scored higher on the Disability IAT than 75% of the group with a stated strong preference for disabled people. This indicates that their strongly stated preferences align with their implicit associations on the IAT.

D) When we consider the typical range of IAT scores (Q1 to Q3), the group of participants who explicitly indicate a strong preference for abled people are more consistent in demonstrating that preference implicitly through the Disability IAT test.