Assessment, Statistics, and Research

  Introduction to a Basic Study This post provides information about one way to evaluate a workshop or seminar. I will illustrate the process using a hypothetical example of a forgiveness workshop. _____ Learn more about using surveys to explore ideas and evaluate programs in the highly recommended book,  Creating Surveys  available on AMAZON GOOGLE _____ Suppose you wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of a workshop on forgiveness.  You hypothesize that the group participating in the workshop would be more forgiving toward an offender than the group not receiving the forgiveness workshop. Get approval from your company, university, or other research review board. They usually have forms listing the information you need to provide. Recruit participants for your workshop. Obtain consent for the study. Select   a forgiveness program Select a survey to measure progress in forgiveness. Create two groups of people.     Group 1 gets the workshop now.   ...

In this post, I refer to a set of items to assess gratitude. The  Gratitude Questionnaire  uses six items and was published by McCullough, Emmons, and Tsang in 2002. I have written elsewhere about gratitude . People high in the virtue of gratitude are often high in other virtues as well such as optimism and life satisfaction. They also tend to be more religious. In a previous post, The Psychology of Gratitude , I list some suggestions to increase gratitude. Reliability In previous research, the authors found support for one factor. Coefficient alpha , a measure of interitem consistency, ranged from .76 to .84 in samples reported by the authors  (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002; McCullough, Tsang, & Emmons, 2002). Rating the Scale Items When using the scale in surveys the items are rated on a 7-point scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7). High scores indicate a higher level of self-reported gratitude. Here's the 7-point rating: 1 ...

Averages Can Be Deceiving What You Need to Know About Averages Most people assume that a simple statistic like a mean or a median tells the whole story. It doesn’t. Averages can clarify—but they can also mislead—depending on which one you use and how your data are distributed. Understanding the mean, median, and mode helps you interpret test scores, salaries, evaluations, and research findings with greater accuracy. CALCULATOR : I have included a basic calculator at the bottom of this page. The Mean, Median, and Mode Mean The mean is the arithmetic average of a set of numbers. You calculate it by adding all the values and dividing by the number of values. Example: For the data 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, the sum is 15 and the mean is 3. The mean uses every value in the dataset, which makes it useful but also sensitive to extreme scores. Median The median is the middle value when numbers are arranged from lowest to highest. Half the values fall above it and half fall below it. Example: In the set 1,...