Instructions

As part of your registration for this course, NCU provides access to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Take time to ensure your access to SPSS so that you can troubleshoot problems now. If you have difficulty accessing SPSS, contact the NCU IT support desk (..k@ncu.edu). Once you access SPSS, any questions should be addressed to your instructor.

In this assignment, you will become reacquainted with SPSS, review some of the basic statistics used in the previous statistics course, and enhance APA format when presenting statistical results. Be sure to revisit the resource, Discussing Statistics In-Text, in the Academic Success Center's Statistics Resources (see link in this week's resources).

The small dataset in Table 1 is the same as the data file, confidencescores.sav, available from this week's resources. These data are from a study conducted within a single middle school. The following small data set is from a study conducted within a single middle school. Fundamentally, the researcher wants to determine if a relationship exists between number of Years of Experience and Confidence Scores. To go a step further, the researcher wants to examine if Years of Experience could be used as a predictor of Confidence Scores.

Note: The data set also includes Sex, which will be used for the Week 2 assignment. Although it is not a variable of interest in this Week 1 assignment, you can still examine the data for data entry errors and generate descriptives.

This data analysis starts by examining the data for errors, or said another way, ensuring that there are no special circumstances with the data that could lead to confusing or misleading results. Specifically, the data used for analysis are equal to the data collected.

Table 1

Sex, Years of Experience, and Confidence Scores

Sex	Years of Experience	Confidence Scores
Male	15	110
Male	3	117
Female	12	118
Male	8	120
Female	23	104
Female	9	100
Male	37	107
Male	14	115
Male	10	114
Female	4	115
Female	11	115
Male	1	100
Female	3	117
Female	7	115
Male	2	103
Female	21	125
Male	28	115
Female	9	115
Male	5	110
Female	3	110

Next, follow these steps to examine the data for accuracy:

1. Identify the level of measurement of each of the three variables.
2. Identify the dependent and independent variable based on the information given in the description of what the researcher wants to know.

Length: Complete responses to all six questions and prompts. Please include the question prompts along with your responses in your assignment submission. In addition to a WORD (.doc) file with the answers to the assignment questions, also include the output (.spv) file. (NOTE: SPSS automatically generates the .spv file as you work in SPSS. When you close your SPSS main window, SPSS will ask you if you want to save the output file. Click 'yes', then save to your computer and upload with your assignment.)