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...
I am teaching positive psychology for the first time this semester. One way to quickly teach students that this isn't just Happy Psych. 101 is to show them convincing data collected by an international organization (here, the United Nations) that demonstrates the link between positive psychology and the well-being of nations. This data isn't just for a positive psychology class: You could also use it more broadly to demonstrate how research methods have to be adjusted when data is collected internationally (see item 4) and as examples of different kinds of data analysis (as described under item 1). 1) Report on international happiness data from the United Nations . If you look through the data collected, there is a survival analysis related to longevity and affect on page 66. A graphic on page 21 describes factors that account for global variance in happiness levels across countries. There is also a lot of data about mental health care spending in different nations. 2 ...