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Social and Behavioral Statistics
Excel Examples
updated 8/3/05
The excel files below were developed by Jeff Aspelmeier as course materials for teaching statistics and research methods. You are free to use these files as you need and to adapt them in any way necessary.
Chapter 3 - Frequency Distributions, Graphs, & Charts
Chapter 4 - Measures of Central Tendency
Chapter 5 - Measures of Variability
Penguin Hallucinations: Population & Sample Variance & Standard Deviations
Chapter 8 - Constructing Confidence Intervals
Confidence Intervals for 2 Political Candidates: Sleazy vs. Slimy
This actually goes with a cartoon from Life is Hell by Matt Greonig, where Jeff & Ackbar discuss the pro's and cons of two candidates. I think it is in the Big Book of Hell. Sorry, I do not have a better reference (ja).
Chapter 10 - Simple Regression & Correlation
A really cool thing you can demonstrate with this example, is how easily spurious correlations can occur by chance with small samples (e.g. you can generate your own sampling distribution under the Null hypothesis). To do this replace one of the data points in the IV or DV with the equation "=rand()", which returns a random number. Copy the contents of this cell into all of the cells for the IV and DV. Every time you paste these formulas, you get a different set of random numbers (Ctrl+V; is the keyboard shortcut for pasting) and the resulting correlation changes. It only takes a few iterations to see that extreme correlations are likely to occur when you have small samples.
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