Friends. You don't know what finding fun stats blog content has been like over the last few years. All of the data writers/websites I followed were always writing about, explaining, and visualizing COVID or political data (rightfully so). I prefer examples about puppies , lists of songs banned from wedding reception s, and ghosts . Memorable examples stick in my students' heads and don't presuppose any knowledge about psychological theory.  Due to the lack of silly data and my own life as a professor, mom of two, wife, and friend, my number of posts during The Rona definitely dipped.  But now, as the crocuses bloom in Erie, PA, the earth, and I, are finding new life and new examples. Nathaniel Rakich, writing for FiveThirtyEight, wrote a whole piece  USING TAYLOR SWIFT TO EXPLAIN POLLING/SAMPLING ERROR S. Specifically, this article tackles three different polling firms and how they went about asking Americans which Taylor Swift album is their favorite Taylor Swift album....

This NPR story is about a survey conducted by the folks at Sesame Street. And that survey asked parents and teachers about kindness. If kids are kind, if the world is kind, how they define kindness, etc.. The NPR story is a round about way of explaining how we operationalize variables, especially in psychology. And the survey itself provides examples of forced choice research questions and dichotomous responses that could have been Likert-type scales. The NPR Story: The Children's Television Workshop, the folks behind Sesame Street, have employees in charge of research and evaluation (a chance to plug off-the-beat-path stats jobs to your students). And they did a survey to figure out what it means to be kind when you are a kid. They surveyed parents and teachers to do so. The main findings are summarized here . Parents and teachers are worried that the world isn't kind and doesn't emphasize kind. But both groups think that kindness is more important than academic a...

This headline is a good example of a) journalists misrepresenting statistics as well as b) confidence intervals/margin of error more broadly. See the headline below: In actuality, Bernie didn't exactly take the lead over Hillary Clinton. Instead, a Quinnipiac poll showed that 41% of likely Democratic primary voters in Iowa indicated that they would vote for Sanders, while 40% reported that they would vote for Clinton. If you go to the original Quinnipiac poll , you can read that the actual data has a margin of error of +/- 3.4%, which means that the candidates are running neck and neck. Which, I think, would have still been a compelling headline.  I used this as an example just last week to explain applied confidence intervals. I also used this as a round-about way of explaining how confidence intervals are now being used as an alternative/compliment to p -values. 

Hi! Here is my presentation from APS . I am posting it so that attendees and everyone else can have access to the links and examples I used. If you weren't there for the presentation, a warning: It is text-light, so there isn't much of a narrative to follow but there are plenty of links and ideas and some soon-to-be-published research ideas to explore. Shoot me an email (hartnett004@gannon.edu) if you have any questions. ALSO: In the talk I reference the U.S. Supreme Court case Hall v. Florida ( also did a blog entry about this case ). Update: The court decided in the favor of Hall/seemed to understand standard error/made it a bit harder to carry out the death penalty, as discussed here by Slate). Woot woot!

Here is Think Progress' story about a U.S. Supreme Court case that hinges on statistics. The case centers around death row inmate Freddy Lee Hall. He was sentenced to death in Florida for the murder of Karol Hurst in 1978. This isn't in dispute. What is in dispute is whether or not Hall qualifies as mentally retarded and, thus, should be exempt from the death penalty per Virginia vs. Atkins . So, this is an example relevant to any number of psychology classes (developmental, ethics, psychology and the law, etc.). It is relevant to a statistics class because the main thrust of the argument has to do with the margin of error associated with the IQ test that designated Hall as having an IQ of 71. In order to qualify as mentally retarded in Florida, an individual has to have an IQ of 70 or lower. So, at first blush, Hall is out of luck. Until his lawyers bring up the fact that the margin of error on this test is +/- 5 points. This is a good example of confidence intervals/marg...

One way of teaching about margin of error/confidence intervals is via political polling data. From  mvbarer.blogspot.com Here is a good site that has a break down of polling data taken in September 2012 for the 2012 US presidential election. I like this example because it draws on data from several well-reputed polling sites, includes their point estimates of the mean and their margin of errors. This allows for several good examples: a) the point estimates for the various polling organization all differ slightly (illustrating sampling error), b) the margin of errors  are provided, and c) it can be used to demonstrate how CIs can overlap, hence, muddying our ability to predict outcomes from point estimates of the mean. I tend to follow the previous example with this gorgeous polling data from Mullenberg College : This is how sampling is done, son! While stats teachers frequently discuss error reduction via big n , Mullenberg takes it a step further by o...

Jorge Cham of PhD Comics quickly summarizes the problems that can occur as research is translated to the masses via the media. Funny AND touches on CI, sampling, psychometrics, etc. Property of phdcomics.com