Final Draft Writing Assignment 1

docx

School

Texas A&M University *

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Course

301

Subject

Statistics

Date

Apr 3, 2024

Type

docx

Pages

Uploaded by DrOysterPerson1080

1 WRITING ASSIGNMENT #1 Introduction Descriptive statistics provide concise summaries of key features in a dataset, such as central tendencies, variability, and distribution. This helps in understanding the overall structure of the data. Focusing on central tendencies and variabilities, central tendencies include the mean, median, and mode, while variability focuses on range, variance, and standard deviation. Both are very important in understanding datasets, central tendencies provide information on where the center of the data is located, while variability provides information of the spread of data around the center provided from the central tendency. These descriptives will be used to understand the output of our data set to examine the personality traits of Texas A&M students so that we will be able to compare the mean and standard deviation to similar data sets. This will allow us to compare the statistics of Texas A&M students personalities to Texas University students personalities based on the questionnaire that had been filled out. Method There was a total of 106 participants for the Texas A&M students dataset. The provided frequencies of the genders of the participants shows 12.3% of participants are male and 87.7% of participants are female. There are five variables of interest, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness. A total of 10 items were used to scale participants in the five variables, two questions for each variable, one being a positive towards the variables and the other serving as a negative to indicate the participants full score for each variable. Participants were given a scale from one to seven for each question, meaning all of the values for our data will be between

2 WRITING ASSIGNMENT #1 one and seven. The higher score for each variable indicates a participant is more positively inclined towards the variable associated while a lower score indicates a participant negatively inclined towards the variable associated. In example, a higher score for extraversion indicates a participant is possibly very extraverted while a lower score will indicate that they are more likely to be introverted. Results In the study, according to the gathered and sorted data, A&M students were very conscientious ( M = 5.59, SD = 1.21) but less emotional stability ( M = 3.76, SD = 1.32). Extraversion ( M = 3.80, SD = 1.70), agreeableness ( M = 5.21, SD = 1.12), and openness ( M = 5.39, SD = 1.01) were all between the two extremes. The variables agreeableness, conscientious, and openness histograms show a left skew, showing A&M students show a strong inclination towards these variables. Extraversion has a right skew, showing A&M students lower inclination towards extraversion. Emotional stability being the only histogram with a normal distribution. Discussion Within the data retrieved for us, it is suggested that most A&M students are conscientious and that they are less mentally stable. Due to A&M’s stereotype as a friendly and outgoing college campus, it is surprising that their numbers for extraversion and openness aren’t their largest showing traits. When in person at the campus, it does seem calmer and more introverted as many students do have headphones on or are on their own devices worrying about their classes. This however is not a sample that is able to represent the population of all of A&M students, as the documented data is from a selection from a psychology brain and sciences course. Making this data a convenience sampling.

3 WRITING ASSIGNMENT #1 Comparing to data from a UT sample following the same questionnaire shown that UT students have a higher score of emotional stability ( M = 4.83, SD = 1.42) than A&M students ( M = 3.76, SD = 1.32). This could possible be due to A&M having more of a focus on being a research institution while UT focuses more on liberal arts. The difference in the surrounding area could also affect students mental health as A&M is part of a small town while Austin is considered a large city. A similar data point between the two sets of data is each colleges conscientiousness. UT’s conscientiousness ( M = 5.4, SD = 1.32) is only slightly lower than A&M’s ( M = 5.59, SD = 1.21) but the similarity shows that both colleges foster environments to grow empathy and the want to improve the world, possibly due to the sense of accomplishment towards students career paths college provides.

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