Assignment 1

The aim of this assignment is for you to practise using SPSS to analyse data. You should attempt each of the questions detailed on the following pages using the SPSS Survival Manual as your guide. You will need to have read through the SPSS Survival Manual first to familiarise yourself with its contents and to revise the various statistical procedures covered.

You will be asked to interpret some output generated by SPSS. For a number of the questions in this exercise you are required to report the results of analyses performed on the data file. These should be formatted as you would present them in a research report. Full details should be provided concerning the analyses performed, assumptions that were checked, and the results obtained. The more practice you get with this process, the easier it will be for you to write up the results of your analyses. Details on how to structure a report are available on AUTonline.

Part A

1. A market researcher is interested in the coffee drinking habits of males and females. He asks a sample of male and female office workers to record the number of cups of coffee they consume during a week.

(a) Which parametric statistical technique could the researcher use to determine if males and females differ in terms of the number of cups of coffee consumed in a week? Justify your answer and describe how you would obtain this statistic using SPSS.
Independent-samples t-tests

(b) What are the key values you would look for in the output?

(c) What assumptions should you check for when using the technique that you chose in question 2(a) above.
Interval scaled data with normally distributed scores
Random sampling data

(d) What non-parametric technique (chapter 16) could be used to address this research question?
(p109)
Mann-Whitney U Test

2. The following output was obtained using SPSS.