Designing a Study Examples

These are the steps to design a study, but they’re out of order. What’s the correct order?
a- Analyze your data
b- Make a conclusion
c- Form a hypothesis
d- Ask a question
e- Collect your data
f- Display your data

a) c, d, f, e, b, a
b) d, c, e, a, f, b
c) d, c, e, b a, f
d) d, f, e, c, b, a

The correct order is b) d, c, e, a, f, b. We first (d) think of a question, then (c) form a hypothesis, then e) collect data. After a) analyzing the data we f) display the data and b) make our conclusions about whether the hypothesis was correct.

Which of the following questions is un-biased?

a) Do you agree that funny animal videos are the most popular YouTube videos?

b) Which YouTube videos are watched the most, funny and cute animal tricks or violent and scary gamer videos?

c) Which YouTube videos do you watch the most, animal videos or gamer videos?

d) Most kids enjoy watching gamers on YouTube. Do you agree or disagree?

The answer is c.

Answer a) states an opinion and then asks for agreement. This question has a bias in it. Question b) has positive adjectives for one outcome and negative adjectives for the other outcome, thus skewing the data, and question d) only states one of the outcomes and then seeks agreement.

You want to give a survey about how popular a YouTube video is. Which of the following sample populations is biased?

a) Every 10th person that walks down the street

b) Every 5th house in a neighborhood

c) Each student in a middle school

d) All of your friends

The answer is d. If we are only asking our friends, they probably like the same things we like and have similar interests. This is biased. We have to question a random set of people to make the survey sample unbiased.