The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services produced a bunch of great videos to explain topics related to human subject research . The videos were created as part of a broader outreach effort intent on  explaining the research process to research participants .  I think they would fit right into a Research Methods course. Topics include: IRBs: Research design: There is also a specific video explaining social science research: All of the videos (along with handouts) are available here . All videos have closed-captions as well as Spanish versions

Here is a YouTube video that summarizes some research findings . The researchers looked at Tweets in order to study how are focus and emotions change with our sleep/wake cycles. And the findings are interesting and not terribly surprising. Folks are mellow and rational in the morning and contemplate their mortality at 2 AM. Make money, get paid. And THIS is why I go to bed by 9 AM. I don't need to think about death at 2:20 AM. How to use in class: 1) Archival data (via Tweet) to explore human emotion. 2) What are the shortcomings of this sample method. To be sure, their data set is ENORMOUS, but how are Twitter users different from other people? Do your students think these findings would hold for people who work the night shift? 3) Go back to the original paper and look more closely at the findings: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0197002 4) This data represents one of the ways that researchers collect real-time information ...

I don't find many examples of cluster analysis to share, but this example is REALLY engaging (using data to find serial killers), and is simple enough for a baby statistician BUT you can also make it a more advanced lesson as the data's owners freely share their data and code. Short Version: Journalist Thomas Hargrove (and his team) used cluster analysis to find clusters of similar killings within geographic areas. These might be a sign that a serial killer is active in that geographic region. It correctly identified a killer in Indiana. I found this interview from datainnovation.org which most succinctly describes the data analysis: https://www.datainnovation.org/2017/07/5-qs-for-thomas-hargrove-founder-of-the-murder-accountability-project/ Also statsy because the cluster analysis was validated using data from known serial killers. Hargrove's data and code can be accessed  here  and more information on his overall project to solve murders can be found...

In just over five minutes, this concise, clear TEDed talk that explains a) false positives, b) base rate fallacy, and c) conditional probability. And it manages to explain each of those three concepts individual while also showing how those three concepts interact. That's a lot of bang for your buck. **Note: This video is sort of a commercial for Brilliant.org, which claims to teach critical thinking via riddles and questions. FYI.

Crash course website produces brief, informative videos. They are a mix of animation and live action, and cover an array of topics, including statistics. This one is all about measures of central tendency: Here is the listing under their #statistics tag , which includes videos about correlation/causation, data visualization, and variability. And, you know what? This is just a super cool web site, full stop. Here are all of their psychology videos .

This video provides an example of mode when it reveals survey data about the most common for of birth control used by married women or women who live with their partners. Before revealing the answer, they have strangers sitting in a produce department of a grocery store discussing their best guess for the answer? Huh? Well, at least you get to listen to strangers awkwardly talking about pulling out in front of a bunch of vegetables. I think that traditionally aged college students are a little surprised by the modal response: Sterilization. This opens up the opportunity to talk about the sampling: They could only survey women who are electing to use birth control (so, not trying to get pregnant) AND in a long term relationship, so a more permanent form of family planning is probably more attractive.

Roeder, writing for fivethirtyeight.com, has come up with a new way to illustrate the Central Limit Theorem. And it uses Plinko, the beloved The Price is Right game! http://www.businessinsider.com/price-is-right-contestant-plinko-record-2017-5 Well, a variation upon Plinko, featured on the NBC game show The Wall. Their Plinko is much larger and more dramatic and the slots at the bottom go up to $1 million. See below. http://selenahughes.com/1553-2/ How does CLT come into play? Well, the ball is randomly thrown down The Wall. And people jump around and hope for certain outcomes. But what outcome is most likely over time? For the pattern of ending positions to conform to the normal curve. Which it did. See below. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-if-god-were-a-giant-game-of-plinko/ The article itself gets pretty spiritual as the author starts talking about randomness, of the show and of life. You can steal, but cite, the game show as example of CLT as he ...

Pew Research Center  is an excellent source for data to use in statistics and research methods classes. I have blogged about them before (look  under the Label pew-pew! ) and I'm excited to share that Pew is starting up a series of videos dedicated to research methods. The new series will be called Methods 101 . The first describes sampling techniques in which weighing is used to adjust imperfect samples as to better mimic the underlying population. I like that this is a short video that focuses on one specific aspect of polling. I hope that they continue this trend of creating very specific videos covering specific topics. Looking for more videos? Check out Pew's YouTube Channel . Also, I have a video tag for this blog. 3/25/2018 They have posted their second video, this one on proper wording for research questions as to avoid jargon and bias.

I found this video at the Student Problems Page on Facebook . I don't know who to attribute it to, but it was probably a smart, sarcastic Intro Stats student.

A pretty video featuring Billy Barr, a gentleman that has been recording weather day in his corner of Gothic, Colorado for the last 40 years.  Billy Barr This brief video highlights his work. And his data provides evidence of climate change. I like this video because it shows how ANYONE can be a statistician, as long as... They use consistent data collection tools... They are fastidious in their data entry techniques... They are passionate about their research. Who wouldn't be passionate about Colorado?

Holy smokes. How am I just learning about this amazing resource (thanks, Amy Hogan, for the lead) now? The folks over at Annenberg, famous for Zimbardo's Discovering Psychology series, also have an amazing video collection about statistics, called "Against All Odds" . Each video couches a statistical lesson in a story. 1) In addition to the videos , there are student and faculty guides to go along with every video/chapter. I think that using these guides, and instructor could go textbook free. 2) The topics listed approximate an Introduction to Statistics course. https://www.learner.org/courses/againstallodds/guides/faculty.html

This is an excellent video for introducing t -tests AND finally getting the story straight regarding William Gossett, Guinness Brewery, and why Gossett published under the famous Student pseudonym. What did I learn? Apparently, Gossett DID have Guinness' blessings to publish. Also, this story demonstrates statisticians working in Quality Assurance as the original t-tests were designed to determine the consistency in the hops used in the brewing process. Those jobs are still available in industry today. Credit goes to the RStats Institute at Missouri State University.  This group has created many other tutorial videos for statistics as well.

New York Magazine's  The Science of Us made a brief, funny video that investigates the long running issue of the dangers of double dipping.  It is based on a Scientific America report of an actual published research article  about double dipping. Yes, it includes the Seinfeld clip about George double dipping. The video provides a brief example of how to go about testing a research hypothesis by operationalizing a hypothesis, collecting, and analyzing data. Here, the abstract question is about how dirty it is to double dip. And they operationalized this question: Research design: The researchers used a design that, conceptually, demonstrates ANOVA logic (the original article contains an ANOVA, the video itself makes no mention of ANOVA). The factor is "Dips" and there are three levels of the factor: Before they double dipped, they took a base-line bacterial reading of each dip. Good science, that. They display the findings in table form (aga...

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 ...

Fivethirtyeight provides lots of beautiful pictures of spurious correlations found by their own in-house study. At the heart of this article are the limitations of a major tool use in nutritional research, the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). The author does a mini-study, enlisting the help of several co-workers and fivethirtyeight.com readers. They track track their own food for a week and reflect on how difficult it is to properly estimate and recall food (perhaps a mini-experiment you could do with your own students?). And she shares the spurious correlations she found in her own mini-research: Aschwanden also discusses how much noise and lack of consensus their is in real, published nutritional research (a good argument for why we need replication!):  http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/ How to use in class: -Short comings of survey research, especially survey research that relies on accurate memories -...

Two scientists, Lazris and Rifkin, want to better illustrate the risks and benefits associated with preventative medicine. They do so by asking people to imagine theaters filled with 1,000 people, and describing the costs and benefits for different preventative procedures by discussing how many people in the theater will be saved or perish based on current efficacy data. One such video can be viewed here and illustrates the absolute and relative risks associated with mammography. They are attempting to demystify statistics and better explain the risks and benefits by showing an animated theater filled with 1,000 women, and showing how many women actually have their lives saved by mammograms (see screen shot below)... ...as well as the number of women who received false positives over the course of a life time... A screen shot of the video, which is trying a new way to illustrate risk. ...the video also illustrates how a "20% reduction in breast cancer deaths" ca...

Good data should inform our decisions. Even a really stressful decision. This site demonstrates this beautifully by providing UK pediatric hospital survival rates to aid the parents of children undergoing heart surgery. The information is translated for laypeople. They present statistical ideas that you and your students have heard of but without a lot of statistical jargon. The data is also explained very clearly. For example, they  present detailed hospital survival rates , which include survival ranges: So, it contains data from a given period. It includes the actual mortality rate and a range likely to have a valid mortality rate. So, essentially, they are confidence intervals but not precisely confidence intervals. In addition to this more traditional presentation of the data, the survival ranges are explained in greater detail in a video . I think this video is helpful because it describes the distribution of the sample mean and how to use them to estimate ac...

Organizations have frequently tried to shut down/manipulate data for their own ends. Big tobacco and lung cancer and addiction research . The National Football League and Chronic Traumatic Encephaly . And for the last 20 years, the National Rifle Association has successfully blocked funding for research investigating public safety and gun ownership. Essentially, the NRA has concentrated on eliminating funding at the CDC for research related to a better understanding of how guns hurt people. It started in 1996 with the Dickey Amendment and no one has been willing to fight to bring back funding. The APA wrote a piece on this in 2013 that summarizes the issue. In the wake of the shooting in Orlando, NPR did a story explaining how the American Medical Association is trying to change the rules governing gun research  and  the L.A. times published this column . I think this precedence is unfortunate from both sides of the gun debate. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania. I've...

This hilarious video is making the rounds on the Interwebz. Kudos to John Oliver and his writing team for so succinctly and hilariously summarizing many different research problems...why replication is important but not rewarded, how research is presented to the public, how researchers over-reach about their own findings, etc.  I Tweeted about this, but am making it cannon by sharing as a blog post. Note: This video has some off-color humor (multiple references to bear fellatio) so it is best suited to college aged students. I will use this in my Online and Honors classes as discussion prompts. Here are some of the prompts I came up with: 1) In your own words, why aren't replications published? How do you think the scientific community could correct this problem?  2) In your own words, explain just ONE of how a RESEARCHER can manipulate their own data and/or research findings. It should be one of the methods of manipulation described in the video. Also, don't just na...

Oh, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, you unkillable scamp. This video , from Vox, gives a concise historical perspective on the scale, describes how popular it still is, and summarizes several of the arguments against the scale. This video explains why the ol' MBTI is not particularly useful. Good for debunking psychology myths and good for explaining reliability (in particular, test-retest reliability) and validity. I like this link in particular because it presents its argument via both video as well as a smartly formatted website. The text in the website includes links to actual peer-reviewed research articles that refute the MBTI.