How Social Scientists use Statistics, Samples and Probability to Answer Research Questions — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

Presenter photographs should be head and shoulder shots comparable to passport photos.

Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

How Social Scientists use Statistics, Samples and Probability to Answer Research Questions

Name: Jessica Sendef
Major: Psychology, Neuroscience
Hometown: Oswego, Il
Faculty Sponsor:
Other Sponsors:
Type of research: Independent research

Abstract

Over this past semester, I have been working on a peer-reviewed journal article. But here’s the catch: the journal I submitted to is a children’s journal called Frontier Young Minds. Frontier Young Minds allows young children to read and review articles, while being able to freely access articles by distinguished scientists written for younger audiences to understand. The article I wrote was about statistics within the social sciences, and was called, “How Social Scientists use Statistics, Samples and Probability to Answer Research Questions.” The article broadly covers asking research questions and how to scientifically test them using new statistics. New statistics is a branch of statistics used increasingly by psychological scientists. This type of statistics focuses on using confidence intervals and effect size to estimate the magnitude of (i.e., how much of) effect there is on behavior from an independent variable. This differs from traditional statistical procedures (namely, null hypothesis testing) , that uses p-values and hypothesis testing to only detect the presence of an effect on behavior by an independent variable. I wrote about new statistics because that’s what these young scientists will eventually learn if they study psychological science.

Poster file