Mother Jones' mass shooting database

Mother Jones' magazine maintains a database of mass shooting events in the United States. 25 variables are collected from every shooting

MJs collects 25 variables from every shooting. Below, I've included their own description of the purpose of their database:

How to use in class:

Within this data is an example for every test we teach in Introduction to Statistics.

Correlation/Regression
Fatalities
Injuries
Age of shooter
Year of shooting

Chi-square
Shooter gender
Shooter ethnicity
Mass or Spree shooting
Were the weapons obtained legally?

ANOVA
Shooter ethnicity

T-test
Mass or Spree shooting
Were the weapons obtained legally?

Data Cleaning
Some of these columns need some work before analysis. For instance, there are multiple weapons listed under "Weapon Type". Which is reasonable, but not helpful for descriptive data. You could walk your students through the process of recoding that column into multiple columns. You could also explain that City and State could be in separate columns.

Graphs versus Raw Data: How should you present your data?

Mother Jones created an interactive map that includes some of the data from the spreadsheet. You could use this to discuss data presentation for different audiences or purposes. When might the map be more effective? When may you be in a situation where people would want to dig through the data?

Inclusion Criteria for Data: The website with the map also explains the inclusion criteria for their database, which allows you to discuss inclusion criteria in research. What factors may make a person ineligible for a research study? Imagine a study that investigates a specific type of person...who might be of interest to a personality psychologist? Or a neurologist?

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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