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Showing posts with the label clinical psychology

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Updated example of using baby names to illustrate bimodal distributions.

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...

Our World in Data website

Our World in Data is an impressive, creative-commons licensed site managed by Max Roser . And it lives up to its name. The website provides all kinds of international data, divided by country, topic (population, health, food, growth & inequality, work, and life, etc.), and, when available, year. It contains its own proprietary data visualizations, which typically feature international data for a topic. You can customize these visualizations by nation. You can also DOWNLOAD THE DATA that has been visualized for use in the classroom. Much of the data can be visualized as a map and progress, year by year, through the data, like this data on international human rights. https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/  https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/ There are also plenty of topics of interest to psychologists who aren't teaching statistics. For example, international data on suicide: Data for psychology courses...https://ourworldindata.org/suicide/ Work...