Political bias in academia and a paired-samples t test: The following is an exce
ID: 3150473 • Letter: P
Question
Political bias in academia and a paired-samples t test: The following is an excerpt from the abstract (brief opening summary) from a published research study examining a reported bias against conservatives in American academia (Fosse, Gross, & Ma, 2011).
The American professoriate contains a disproportionate number of people with liberal political views. Is this because of political bias or discrimination?…We sent two emails to directors of graduate study in the leading American departments of sociology, political science, economics, history, and English. The emails came from fictitious students who expressed interest in doing graduate work in the department…We analyze responses received in terms of frequency, timing, amount of information provided about the department, emotional warmth, and enthusiasm toward the student. (p. 1)
One of the fictional emails was from a fictional student who mentioned working on the presidential campaign of John McCain, a well-known conservative, and one was from a fictional student who mentioned working on the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, a well-known liberal. The researchers conducted a series of paired-samples t tests, but did not find statistically significant differences on the various measures between the conservative and liberal students.
Why is this a within-groups design?
What is the independent variable and what are its levels?
What are the dependent variables, as listed in the study description, and what kind of variables are they?
Explain why it would have been possible to conduct a paired-samples t test.
Explain why there may have been order effects in this study.
How might the researchers have used counterbalancing?
Was the p value likely to be lower than or higher than 0.05? Explain your answer.
Given that the results were not statistically significant, what additional information would you want to know to determine whether there was sufficient statistical power?
Explanation / Answer
student paired t test is not applicable
student unpaired t test is applicable to the above discussion for discrimination
if p<0.05 then the result will be statistically significant
if p>0.05 then the result will be statistically not significant
The results are not staistically significnt means due to the following reasons
1) less sample size
2)not sufficient statistical power
the sufficient staistical power of the test for the studies is 80%