Assessment, Statistics, and Research

Understanding Descriptive Statistics:  A Simple Guide for Students When you first step into an introductory statistics class, you’ll meet a set of tools that help you describe data. These are called descriptive statistics, and they’re the foundation for everything else you’ll learn later—whether that’s probability, hypothesis testing, or research methods. Think of descriptive statistics as the “snapshot” tools of data analysis. They help you answer three big questions: 1. Where is the center of my data? 2. How spread out is it? 3. What does the overall shape look like? Let’s walk through the essentials. 1. Measures of Central Tendency: Finding the Center These statistics tell you what’s “typical” in a dataset. Mean – The average. Add up all the values and divide by how many there are. Median – The middle value when the data are sorted. Great when your data have outliers. Mode – The most frequent value. Useful for categories (like favorite ice cream flavors). Why it matters: If y...

Prayers 2025 Geoffrey W Sutton & Artspace.ai Assessment name: Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale- 5-Item (RSS-5) Scale overview: The five-item version of the Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale (RSS-5) is a reliable measure of clinically relevant struggles (divine, interpersonal, moral, doubt, ultimate meaning struggles) in mental health care settings. Authors : Sarah G. Salcone, Julie J. Exline, Kenneth I. Pargament, Joseph M. Currier, Ryon C. McDermott, Don E. Davis, Amanda M. Raines, Yejin Lee Cite this post Sutton, G.W. (2025). Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale- 5-Item (RSS-5). Assessment, Statistics, and Research .  https://statistics.suttong.com/2025/03/religious-and-spiritual-struggles-scale.html Response Type: Participants rated each item on a scale of occurrence from 1 = Not at all to 5 = A great deal.  Scale items: There are five items–one from each of the five subscales of the long RSS scale.    Example Questioned whether li...

Counseling 2025 by Geoffrey W Sutton and artspace.ai Assessment name: Cultural Humility Scale Short Form Scale overview: The Cultural Humility Scale Short Form (CHS-SF) has two 3-item subscales (positive/negative cultural humility) developed for clinical practice. In two studies, the authors provided evidence for strong internal consistency, supportive construct and discriminant validity. Authors : Coleman, J. J., Grajzel, K., Dong, Y., Davis, D. E., DeBlaere, C., Hook, J. N., & Owen, J. Response Type: Participants rate the Cultural Humility Scale Short Form on a five-point scale of agreement from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Scale items:    There are three positive and three negative items.     The instructions read:    [Regarding the core aspect(s) of my cultural background, my counselor…]    A positive item: Is considerate    A negative item: Makes assumptions about me. Psychometric properties: See the included tables...