Can we use Instagram to estimate happiness at universities?

OK.

Lotte van Rijswijk, writing for Resume.io, used Instagram photos to determine the happiest college in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Here is the Top 20 list for the US. If you visit the website, you can view similar summaries for the UK and Australian data, as well as an interactive table containing all the data.

Here are some ideas for using it in class:

1. This methodology is pretty interesting. She used smiling recognition software and pictures from Instagram to measure happiness. I think this study would pair well with this study about using software to evaluate smiles: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617734315

https://resume.io/blog/the-happiest-schools-in-the-us-uk-and-australia

2. Ask your student to consider the sampling error that may result from using Instagram data for any research. For example, are photos on Insta representative of human experiences? Is it reasonable to gather a sample of college-aged students using Insta?

3. The ranking system is a fine example of ordinal data. You can see that clearly since the percentage smiling is listed right next to the rank order.

4. Ask your student to generate research hypotheses that could be answered with facial recognition software.

5. Here is the data, with the US, UK, and Australia data. In addition to the data from the website (rank, college, location, percent smiling), I added a column for the country. Mostly, I did this so you can use it as an example when you teach ANOVA.

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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