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Showing posts with the label YouGov

Social Comparison Theory: T-test, ANOVA, and a very common way to trichotomize data.

Hey!  I'm giving a keynote at the February annual teaching pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. It's all about social psychology stats example. Like this one! This one demonstrates social comparison theory without ever saying social comparison theory. YouGov published data  ( here is the full data source ) that asked participants to rate their own, close-other, and far-others on several factors related to modern life (see below). In doing so, they unknowingly trigger social comparison theory, and in particular, downward social comparison. TL;DR: We know ourselves and how well we are doing compared to other people. And people are motivated to feel good about themselves.     https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/48400-americans-compare-own-outlook-with-country-poll These findings smack of downward social comparison, right? Instead of having a specific target we are comparing ourself to, like a co-worker or a neighbor,...

YouGov America's Thanksgiving-themed chi-square examples

YouGov gifts us with seasonal chi-square examples  with data on Thanksgiving food controversies. For example: How do people feel about marshmallows on sweet potato dishes? This doesn't look randomly distributed to me. Which is more beloved: Light or dark turkey meat? If you want examples for the chi-square test of independence, dig into the PDF containing ALL of this survey's data. The distribution of people who like cranberry sauce by age group does not appear random.

9% of Americans think they could beat a crocodile in a fight. What?

 https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2021/05/13/lions-and-tigers-and-bears-what-animal-would-win-f Sorry that I haven't been posting as often lately. You would think that with the summer, I would have more flexibility, but I am working hard on some writing deadlines (for a stats textbook!), and my kids' activities have picked up considerably with soccer season starting. This example illustrates fun data visualizations as well as a t-test. YouGov is a polling company, sort of like Gallup. They collect many Very Serious polls and silly polls like  this one, where they asked participants to state whether or not they could beat 34 different animals (from rats to grizzly bears) in an unarmed fight. Their graphic designer deserves a raise for this bar graph, including several tragic humans vs. animal memes/movie clips. Here are a few lessons you can draw out of this funny data. Paired t-test example: They took the participants identified as men and women and...