Assessment, Statistics, and Research

The chart based on data from CDC 2015 provides an example of tracking three trends over time. The bars indicate the percentage of births to unmarried women. The upper teal line represents the median age at first marriage and the orange broken line indicates median age at first birth. Notice the "crossover" of the two lines referring to first birth and first marriage. Note also the stabalized trend for births to unmarried women easily visible on the bar portion of the chart. About 40% of women are unmarried when their children are born. You can read text related to the story at the BGSU weblink:   https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/eickmeyer-payne-brown-manning-crossover-age-first-marriage-birth-fp-17-22.html Creating Surveys Available from  AMAZON Applied Statistics: Concepts for Counselors Available from  AMAZON Connect Geoffrey W. Sutton www.suttong.com Facebook Twitter @GeoffWSutton YouTube

The Adult Hope Scale The Adult Hope Scale developed by C. R. Snyder of the University of Kansas is an easy to use measure of hope. The original scale has 12-items, which measure two dimensions of hope based on hope theory. Four measure agency and four measure pathways--the other four are distractors. The agency concept measures the capacity to focus energy on a goal. The pathways concept assesses plans to achieve goals. In recent studies, the four distraction items are often dropped leaving 8-items. Researchers often use the total score for the 8-items as a measure of trait (aka dispositional) hope. Find Snyder's The Psychology of Hope I have also included a Spanish language measure of hope in this post. Here's the text we (Sutton et al., 2018) used to refer to the scale along with our findings. The items used a response format of 1 =  definitely false  to 8 =  definitely true . A sample item is, “I meet the goals I set for myself.” Snyder et al. (1991) repor

When counselors and psychologists report test scores, they often report one of the scores found in the table below. When several tests are used, it is helpful to know how the scores compare from one test to another. A good place to begin is to locate the average score-- that's the row where z = 0. Then look at the broad middle range between z = -1 and z = 1. About 68% of people score between z = -1 and z = 1. Intelligence Tests use Standard Scores abbreviated as SS. These scores take the place of the old IQ score. An average IQ is 100 -- about 68% of people score between 85 and 115. Here's a table from Appendix B of Applied Statistics: Concepts for Counselors Each row contains the equivalent score on a different scoring system. For example, a z -score of 1 equals a T score of 60, and a standard score of 115. The score is at the 84 th percentile. z T Standard Percentile Ra