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Help with statistics for c/wk

For my Psychology coursework I have done an investigation into STM, which is a replication of Peterson and Peterson (1959) study. I have recorded my results from my investigation as follows:

Participant no Gender (M/F) Recall at 3s? (Y/N) Recall at 6s? (Y/N) Recall at 9s? (Y/N) Recall at 12s? (Y/N) Recall at 15s? (Y/N) Recall at 18s? (Y/N)
1 F N Y N Y Y Y
2 M Y N N Y N N
3 F Y N Y N N N
4 F Y Y N N N N
5 F Y Y Y N N N
6 F Y Y Y N N N
7 M Y N N N N N
...And so on.

I know that the table is a bit dodgy, but this is how it has come out as I've pasted into this thread. But my question is... does anyone have any idea how I could use this data to find out the measures of central tendancy (e.g. mean, mode, median) and also the measures of dispersion.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Reply 1
Avatar for Jeffrey_91
Jeffrey_91
OP
Anyone?
Reply 2
Avatar for jamiedavies
jamiedavies
As the table stands now you have collected nominal data.

To be able to calculate central tendency or dispersion you need at least ordinal data.
Reply 3
Avatar for Jeffrey_91
Jeffrey_91
OP
jamiedavies
As the table stands now you have collected nominal data.

To be able to calculate central tendency or dispersion you need at least ordinal data.

That's the only data I have, is there any way at all to calculate the central tendency or dispersion using that? If no, how damaging is this to my coursework (i.e. how many marks will I lose for not calculating any averages etc).
Reply 4
Avatar for jamiedavies
jamiedavies
Not really - well not at the level you'd be expected to use for A Level. The only way you could is to create ordinal data from what you have so that you can do basic statistics on it. However, this all depends on what your hypothesis is as to how well it would work.

For example, if you were looking at gender differences in recall from STM then you could create scores for each of the participants - giving them a mark for each Y.

Eg (from above).


Pp M/F Score
1 F 4
2 M 2
3 F 2


Then you would be able to calculate dispersion, central tendency and perform inferential statistics on it.

In OCR psychology you could loose most of the mark for the results section if you don't correctly perform basic stats on it. Not too sure about AQA / WJEC / Edexcel but I would imagine it is very similar.
Reply 5
Avatar for Jeffrey_91
Jeffrey_91
OP
Ahh, thanks for the advice, I think the mark idea could work quite well in my coursework as I could use it to draw the basic statistics you have mentioned from it and I can use the nominal data to do the chi-squared test for inferential statistics. I'm doing spec. A with AQA so like you said, I presume there will still be a reasonable amount of marks up for grabs in the results from central tendancy etc. :smile:

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