Ages ago, I shared how I teach ANOVA at a conceptual level. I describe within and between group variance using beliefs about the human role in climate between and within different religious groups. This data is now old. And it described global warming, not climate change, which is a crucial language distinction. So you  can imagine my delight when Pew recently released  updated and improved data investigating this issue.  In my attempt to keep the mood light when discussing an example featuring 1) religion, 2) climate change, and 3) politics, I ask students to think about how many different opinions are probably represented around their family's Thanksgiving table. Despite having much in common as a family, like, perhaps, geography, shared stories, and religion, there are still a lot of within-group differences of opinion. This leads to a discussion about people of different religions having between and within group differences of opinion regarding beliefs about global cl...

Question-wording matters, friends! This example shows how question order and question-wording can affect participant response. This is a good example for all of your research methods and psychometrics students to chew on. Pew Research asked people if they believed in evolution . They did so in three different ways, which lead to three different response patterns. 1) Prior to asking about evolution, the asked whether or not the participant believes in God. 2) Asked participants if they believed in evolution. If they said "yes", they asked the participant whether or not they believe that a higher power guides evolution. 3) They asked participants if they believed in evolution and gave participants three response options:     a) Don't believe in evolution.     b) Believe in evolution due to natural selection.     c) Believe in evolution guided by a higher power. Responses to Option 1: Responses to Options 2. and 3. Oh, the classroom discus...

I am a big fan of Pew Research Center . They collect, share, and summarize data about a wide variety of topics. In addition to providing very accessible summaries of their findings, they also provide more in-depth information about their data collection techniques, including original materials used in their data collection and very through explanations of their methods. One topic they collect Pew studies is religion and attitudes (religious and secular) held by people of different religions. And it got me thinking that I could use their data in order to explain within and between group differences at the heart of a conceptual understanding of ANOVA. Specifically, Pew gathered data looking at between-group differences in beliefs in global climate change by religion ... Chart created by Pew Research ... and belief in climate change within just Catholics, divided up by political affiliation. Chart created by Pew Research The questionnaires differed slightly for the...

A study performed by The Public Religion Research Institute  used either a) a telephone survey or b) an anonymous web survey to question people about their religious beliefs and religious service habits. The researchers found that the telephone participants reported higher rates of religious behaviors and greater theistic beliefs. The figure below,  from a New York Times summary of the study , visualizes the main findings. The NYT summary also provides figures illustrating the data broken down by religious denomination. Property of the New York Times Participants also vary in their reported religious beliefs based on how they are surveyed (below, the secular are more likely to report that they don't believe in God when completing an anonymous online survey). Property of Public Religion Research Institute  This report could be used in class to discuss psychometrics, sampling, motivation to lie on surveys, social desirability, etc. Additionally, the sour...