Task 4: A researcher was interested in trying to prevent coulrophobia (fear of clowns) in children.

She decided to do an experiment in which different groups of children (15 in each) were exposed to different forms of positive information about clowns. The first group watched some adverts for McDonald’s in which their mascot Ronald McDonald is seen cavorting about with children and going on about how they should love their mums. A second group was told a story about a clown who helped some children when they got lost in a forest (although what on earth a clown was doing in a forest remains a mystery). A third group was entertained by a real clown, who came into the classroom and made balloon animals for the children.

10 A final group acted as a control and had nothing done to them at all. The researcher took self-report ratings of how much the children liked clowns, resulting in a score for each child that could range from 0 (not scared of clowns at all) to 5 (very scared of clowns). The data are in the file coulrophobia.sav. Access them and conduct a Kruskal–Wallis test. ①