variables (basic math)

7/31/2019 Variables (BASIC MATH)

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STATISTICS


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Is it a quantifiable variable? The color of the sky over a 2 year period.

Price for 6 months.

The likeability of the president on a scale of 1 to 5during his first year n office.

The city of Baguio during the last ten summer seasons.

The number of people in poverty in the Philippines forthe year 2009.

Differences between men and women in the averagenumber of words in their spoken sentences for menand women who work in talk radio.


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Independent vs. Dependent Relationship between these two types of variables.

Dependent variable: its value or behavior is

considered reliant, upon the value of theindependent variable but not the other way around.

Independent variable: its value does not changeaccording to the value of the dependent variable


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A researcher is studying the water levels of a small lake in themountains, and he predicts the water levels of the lake in late

spring are dependent on the amount of snowfall accumulated

over the fall and winter months in the elevations higher than thelake. He hypothesizes that the more snow the higher elevations

receive, the higher the water level will be. Each spring, for several

years, you measure the water levels and snow levels.

Water level is dependent on the amount of snow.More snow causes more runoff which in turn, f lowsinto the lake, causing the water level to rise.Conversely, the amount of snow is independent of the

amount of water in the lake. That is, an increase inwater does not magically cause more snow to fall.

Therefore, water level is the dependent variable andsnow level is the independent variable.


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Other example: Imagine you are studying the relationship between how much

time a teacher spends with a student and that students gender.Which is the independent variable and which is the dependentvariable?

Questions to ask:might time influence gender?might gender influence time?

is it possible being male or female is somehow dependenton how much time a teacher spends with boys and girlsrespectively?

might the time spent with boys and girls somehow bedependent on whether the student is male or female?

Therefore, gender is the independent variable andtime spent is the dependent variable.


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A helpful tip If one variable is describing things that occur before

the things described by another variable happen, thenthe first variable can usually be taken as theindependent variable and second as the dependentvariable. Kalof, Dan, and Dietz (2008)


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Test your understanding of independent and

dependent variables Scenario 1

Corporation XYZ wishes to study the correlationbetween safety training and the number of accidents at

various production sites. Those responsible for thetraining believe that safety training will help reduce theamount of accidents. The numbers of safety hours workteams receive and the number of accidents each team

experiences are recorded for a period of a year aftertraining occurs. What are the independent anddependent variables?


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A researcher examining communication in the workplace believes face-to-face communication compared tophone or e-mail communication is more effective inconveying information in one-to-one situations. In anexperiments, the researcher tests a) how muchinformation subjects retain when they are given that

information b) face-to-face, c) over the phone and d)through e-mail. Of the four variables given, which is thedependent variable.


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A researcher is studying the use of a certain grammaticalfeatures according to the socioeconomic status of a speaker.

In a pilot study involving speakers from a particular city,the lower the socioeconomic status within participants ofthe sample population examined, the more thisgrammatical feature appears in the population. Heresearcher wants to test the hypothesis that thesocioeconomic status influences the frequency of the

grammatical feature for a given socioeconomic group forurban populations in the pacific northwest, and is planningon drawing a random sample of speakers from three citiesin the region. What is the primary independent variableand the dependent variable?

variables (basic math)

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