Here is another example of why representative sampling MUST include women. For years and years, car crash test dummies for adults were all based upon the 50th percentile male. As such, even in vehicles with high safety ratings, women still have higher rates of certain injuries (head, neck, pelvis) than men. In fact, the article cites research that found that belted female car occupants in accidents have a 47% higher chance of suffering a serious injury and a 71% higher chance of suffering a moderate injury compared to men in a car. http://leevinsel.com/blog/2013/12/30/why-carmakers-always-insisted-on-male-crash-test-dummies I wrote a previous blog post about this video that outlines how using only  male rats for pharmaceutical research lead to problems with disproportionately high numbers of side effects in female humans . And this NPR story details changes to federal rules in order to correct this issue with animal testing. How to use in class: -Inappropriate sampling i...

The folks at Wall Street Journal took CDC disease data (by state, by year, courtesy of Project Tycho ) as well as information on when various vaccines were introduced to the public. And the data tells a compelling story about the importance of vaccinations. Below, the story of measles. How to use in class: -Using archival data to educate and make a point (here, vaccine efficacy) -Visualizing many data points (infections x state x year) effectively -Interactive: You can cursor over any cube to see the related data. Below, I've highlighted Pennsylvania data from 1957. -Since you can cursor over any data point to see the data, you can ask your students to pull data for use in class. -The present data were drawn from Project Tycho , a University of Pittsburgh initiative to better share public health data. This resource may be useful for your classes as well. -This data is good for Stats class, as well as Developmental, Health, Public Health, etc.

Our World in Data is an impressive, creative-commons licensed site managed by Max Roser . And it lives up to its name. The website provides all kinds of international data, divided by country, topic (population, health, food, growth & inequality, work, and life, etc.), and, when available, year. It contains its own proprietary data visualizations, which typically feature international data for a topic. You can customize these visualizations by nation. You can also DOWNLOAD THE DATA that has been visualized for use in the classroom. Much of the data can be visualized as a map and progress, year by year, through the data, like this data on international human rights. https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/  https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/ There are also plenty of topics of interest to psychologists who aren't teaching statistics. For example, international data on suicide: Data for psychology courses...https://ourworldindata.org/suicide/ Work...

Factorial ANOVA example ahead! With a lovely interaction. And I have a year old and a 4.5 year old and they are sickly daycare kids, so this example really spoke to me. NPR did a story about a recent publication that studied how we administer medicine to our kids and provides evidence for a few things I've suspected: Measuring cups for kid medicine are a disaster AND syringes allow for more accurate dosing, especially if the dose is small. The researchers wanted to know if parents properly dosed liquid medicine for their kids. The researchers used a 3 (dosage, 2.5, 5.0, 7.5 ml) x 3 (modality: small syringe, big syringe, medicine cup) design. They didn't use factorial ANOVA in their analysis, this example can still be used to conceptually explain factorial ANOVA. Their findings: How to use in class: -An easy-to-follow conceptual example of factorial ANOVA (again, they didn't use that analysis in the original paper, but the table above illustrates factorial ANO...

In honor of the New Year, a post about health.  A team of researchers from Harvard made a brief video that describes their recent publication. The video includes discussion about their hypothesis generation, methodology, and research findings.  Their research question: Does the game Pokemon Go actually improve the health of users? How to use this video in your class: -This is an easily understood research project to share with your RM students. It also goes into detail about the statistics used for analysis. -And the researchers, from fancy-pants Harvard, aren't afraid of being a bit silly and having fun as researchers. As demonstrated by the below images from the video: This guy. Seriously. I hope to some day love my data as much as he loves his data. And they made graphs using Pokemon balls -How do we get our research ideas? Sometimes, from observations about every day living. This research was inspired by the Pokemon Go phenomena. I try to ...