Chapter 2 Homework

Hi Class,

I met with some students yesterday about the exercises due for Tuesday - they we doing a great job except for a couple of the questions where Howell was asking them to make graphs that SPSS does not necessarily do (ex overlay of histograms). Remember Howell is not a book on SPSS so he is going to ask you to think that relate to what he discussed in the chapter...
One thing you could do is to generate the two histograms in SPSS and then draw the overlay by hand using the SPSS output - or for that matter take one of the graphs from SPSS and then hand draw the other one over it (sometimes you have to get creative - and there is always the do-it-by-hand option).
One of the other tings that came up was to make a back to back stem-and-leaf display. The book tells you how to do this, but anyone in their right might mind would rather have SPSS do this. So how do you get SPSS to do the labor of constructing the display (Hint: Analyze > Descriptives > Explore) but you will find that Explore won't do back to back. Again with the histograms, one could have SPSS generate the displays and then make the back to back by hand using the SPSS output. Or you could take one of the displays and hand draw the second display onto the output. Get the idea.

In the real world you might have a professor, a boss, a reviewer, etc. tell you to make a back-to-back stem and leaf display - you can't just say SPSS won't do it - You could 1) talk them out of it by recommending a different way to display the data, 2) you could go back to the books and figure out how to do one entirely by hand, 3) you could tell the editor that the reviewer is being unrealistic and risk loosing the publication, 4) put something together giving your best shot and tell them it is the best you can do, how do they recommend proceeding, 5) phone a friend and ask how they did it, or 6) ...?

Depending on the circumstances and the consequences of not producing the desired display - there are a number of outcomes, but the bottom line is to give it your best shot and then move on to the next thing to get done.

As we move on in the class and you advance your knowledge of statistics and as you gain more experience with your computerized tools (SPSS, Excel, etc.) you will get better on sorting these sorts of things out.

I hope this helps,

--Dr. M