The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data, courtesy of Redditor fevaah , showing old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't). If this idea was help...
There are a lot of lessons in this one study (Craig, Nelson, & Dixson, 2019): Within subject design, factorial ANOVA and interactions,and data is available via OSF. Let's begin: TL: DR: The original study looked and the presence or absence of beards and whether or not this affected participants' ability to decode the emotional expression on a man's face. Or, more eloquently: TL: DR: Their stimuli were pictures of the same dudes with and without beards. And those weren't just any dudes, they had been trained in the Ekman facial coding system as to make distinct expressions. Or... One participant, rating the same man in Bearded vs. Non-bearded condition, provides a clear example of within subject research design. This article also provides examples of interactions and two-way ANOVA. Here look at aggression ratings for expressing (happy v. angry) and face hairiness (clean-shaven v. beard). Look at that bearded face interaction! Bearded guy...