PSYCHOLOGY 101 Kyle Jennings, Instructor

7/20/09 Lecture 12

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Quiz is given at the beginning of lecture. ANNOUNCEMENTS First, the homework has been posted. Second, the readings are also online. Third, you will get your feedback in your second section this week. Fourth, toward the end I am going to save some time to do some informal midcourse evaluations. LECTURE Basic Hypothesis Testing 3 This material concerns the first few sections of Chapter 8. The story so far: by now we have seen the null hypothesis significance testing procedure in two different contexts. We started by figuring it out for an individual score and then we generalized that to a set of scores. We figured out that the way to do it for a set of scores was to take the mean of a sample. The comparison distribution in that case was the distribution of sample means. In all cases, we have been doing the same basic procedure. The comparison distributions have been a little contrived because we have known the mean and standard deviation of the population of scores and we go from there to know the mean and standard deviation of the DOSM. In both cases, we assume that we know the population parameters. However, rarely do we know the population parameters. Knowing the population parameters has been a little unrealistic. Now, we are going to learn how to estimate those parameters from our sample. We are going to learn how to get around not knowing the population mean and population standard deviation. In the long term, what we are going to do for the mean is we are going to compare the means for two

different groups. As for the standard deviation, we are just going to estimate that from our sample. Sample Variance and Standard Deviation So far when we talk about variance, we talk about it in terms of the average square deviation of a set of scores from their mean. We have this equation for variance:

This is a very intuitive formula. Now, we are moving to the case where we do not know the population values. We do not know the population standard deviation or the population mean. How can we estimate them? They can be estimated from the sample. I am going to go back to our doodad factory. We have our doodad factory and they are shipping doodads to Sellouts. Sellouts wants to make sure they are getting what they paid for. The factory advertises a certain mean and standard deviation for what they produce and Sellouts wants to make sure they get that. In particular, they are interested in the standard deviation. The doodads are meant to be individual scores from a population distribution. The population distribution is everything the factory could ever produce. The doodacity is just the particular score of a doodad. So they put 10 doodads on a table. They are going to have two different auditors looking at the doodads. We have an old school auditor man. He knows the population mean is 100 because he has been around for a while, looking at these doodads. Thus, when he

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PSYCHOLOGY 101

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7/20/09

calculates the variance, he uses the population mean and N. The younger guy (on the right) has not been around to know the population mean is 100. He doesnt know what the population mean is so he must estimate it. He is going to calculate the sample mean and use that to calculate the variance. So the younger guy calculates the sample mean and then he plugs that in to the variance equation. The old guy uses population mean while the younger guy uses sample mean. Before we do that, let us revisit a distinction we have seen before. That is between an error and a bias. We can never measure population values with complete accuracy. The point is, for anything non trivial we are trying to measure, whether it is your height or how happy you are, there is always some noise. When we talk about inaccuracy, there is an important distinction to be made between error and bias. Error is an inaccuracy that is equally likely to make an estimate too low as too high. We want to reduce error, but we are comfortable with the fact that it is always going to be there. Bias, on the other hand, is inaccuracy that (almost) always occurs in one direction. Bias is a problem because you are going to be systematically wrong. Bias can be caused by any number of things. I will talk about what causes bias in this case in a second. If you were measuring height by eyeballing it from across the room, there might be an effect where if I am taller than everyone I am measuring, then I may be systematically underestimating height since I am looking down at them. Again, bias can come from any number of things. We can say that estimating population variance using the sample mean is biased. It makes it 10% too small. Why does the sample mean introduce bias? For any sample, the population mean can never be more central than the sample mean. The mean is where the balance point is. It is a unique balance point. If you pushed the distribution to the left or right, the histogram would topple over. Therefore, if you use the population mean to calculate variance, it will increase deviation more than it decreases it. I gave the example of little dudes and lassos. The lassos are the deviation scores. If I were to move the flag a little bit, then that would change the deviation scores that we would get. You can think of the

So here are the two auditors. One uses the population mean to get variance. One uses the sample mean to get variance. They get 10 doodads, do their calculation, write down the answer and then repeat that. Here is that process going on. Each number is a variance. What do you notice about the difference between these two scores? The younger guy is getting lower estimates than the older guy. Let us say they had to do this 10,000 times. I simulated this. The mean that you would get from the old guy is 400.8 and the mean you would get from the younger guy is 361. If you do not remember from the example that I did, the population variance is actually 400. The true value of the variance of what the factory is producing is 400. The younger guy is underestimating the population value at a ratio of 0.9. This is a curious thing. Shall we see why?

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green flag as the population mean. You can think of the red flag as the sample mean. Your population mean is going to be slightly different from your sample mean at all times (because of error). The sample mean is going to be the best place to balance your sample. Once you use your population value, you are going to change the deviation and the net result is that you will increase the deviation.

standard deviation) or S2(for variance). There is no particular good reason for that, but it is just what we do. Only use SD2 or SD when you are referring to population parameters or have observed every possible score (which means by definition you have observed the entire population). In your research papers you will be using N-1. Whenever you use software to calculate standard deviation or variance, it uses N-1.

Due to this systematic bias, you must correct it. This is called Bessels correction. The biased estimation is too small. The correction is to multiply the biased equation by N/(N-1). The proof of this is hard. It requires learning two years of mathematical statistics and then the proof is two lines. It is unfortunate I cannot usefully show you the proof, but just take my word for it. If you want to calculate the unbiased sample variance, you take the biased sample variance and multiply it by N/(N1). Well, if you do the algebra, you get the equation below. This can be confusing to people. It is going to be confusing to people when to use the unbiased formula or the biased formula. I will explain this now.

Now let us try to re-contextualize some things. There have been lots of places we see standard deviation. Just to review, when we calculate Z scores, we use standard deviation. It then gets implicitly gets invoked when we talked about computing correlation (since it uses Z scores). When we compute the standard error, we use the standard deviation as well. When we have been talking about Cohens d, a measure of effect size, we divide by standard deviation. These are all places where we have seen standard deviation. Which equation of variance do you use? The answer is that if you are working with sample data but you want to refer back to the population, then you would want to use S (the unbiased estimate). The only cases where you would not use the S version is if you are told population values ahead of time or if you are only interested in calculating something that applies to just this set of scores that you have and you have no interest in generalizing back to the population.

Let us talk about some notation. Your book has adopted a nonstandard notation. Your book, when it is talking about an estimate using the N, it uses SD (for standard deviation) or SD2 (for variance). When your book uses the N-1 formula, it calls it S (for

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Let us go through these equations. For the Z score equation, I have changed SD to S. The mean now is the sample mean. From now on, I would give you a set of scores, you will not know the population mean or standard deviation and you are going to estimate both from your sample. If you compute Z scores, the mean you will use is the sample mean and the standard deviation you will compute is the unbiased estimate (S). For the correlation equation, notice the N stays the same. We are not dividing by N-1 in correlation formula itself. The only case we use N-1 is when we calculate the variance or standard deviation. We are still estimating the average congruence for correlation. There are still N pairs of scores. You still divide by N for the correlation formula. Any bias there would have been using the sample mean is taken care of by using S instead of SD when calculating variance. The formula for the distribution of sample means standard deviation, or SM, stays the same except you use S. You still divide by the square root of N. The most common mistake is I see people plugging in square root of N-1 for the standard error equation. You are still dividing by the square root of N, not the square root of N-1, so watch out for that. For large samples, this correction does not make a difference. For small samples, the correction makes a huge difference, but it is always safe just to stick with the N-1 formula.

knew the population variance. In that case, the comparison distribution was a normal curve. It is called a Z test because we think of Z scores relative to a standard normal distribution. We know the comparison distribution is a normal curve because we know the population mean and variance. The story changes slightly when we are estimating from the sample. The comparison curve is not normal anymore. Let us go into why that is. We have got our population, samples from the population and the distribution of sample means. Before we had a doodad factory and we had a whatnot factory, the whatnot is just the mean of a bunch of doodads. This is to enforce the concept that you can think of the sample mean as being a score onto its own. We have a bunch of different samples from the population. In this particular case, we have the sample means and sample standard deviations. In the normal case, we had knowledge ahead of time of what the mean and standard deviation of what the population was. Therefore, we got precise knowledge of what the mean and standard deviation of the whatnots was (the DOSM or comparison distribution).

The t Distribution We know how to estimate the standard deviation from a sample. Now we need to learn how to apply that to our hypothesis testing procedures. Before, when we were doing tests about sample means, we

Now we are going to move to a situation where we do not know anything about the population. Let us do that by saying we have a bunch of factories that make doodads. We know that every factory that produces whatnots gets doodads from one factory, but we do not know which doodad factory it is. In this case, we do not know information about the population curve.

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PSYCHOLOGY 101

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7/20/09

standard deviation of the population of scores. We do not know that anymore. We must estimate that from our sample. Our sample standard deviation changes from sample to sample though. We have got two different values that are uncertain (the mean and standard deviation). This could lead to a multi valued comparison distribution. We avoid this by computing the cousin of the score, called the tscore. We do that by dividing the sample mean by a function of the standard deviation. Do you guys know about American Gladiators? Let us pretend that I am jousting. In some bizarre way that is what hypothesis testing is. The gladiators would joust on platforms with water underneath. The one who falls loses. Sometimes those platforms would be moving. It is one thing to try to beat each other up when the platforms are stable. It is another thing when the platforms are moving. In the Z test, the platform for your sample mean is moving and the platform for your comparison distribution is stable. Your comparison distribution is a known entity because you know the population mean and standard deviation. The situation is changed now. You no longer know what the distribution of sample means is going to be. Now both platforms are shaking around. Before our comparison distribution was this known distribution that was stable. Now we have a comparison distribution that itself is a shaky distribution because you are estimating the standard deviation from your actual sample. You are now trying to hit a moving target from a moving target. That means there are more ways to get the wrong answer. The t-distribution is how you adjust for that. The t-distribution is not a normal curve, even though it is similar. We will pick up here next time. End of lecture notes. Notes prepared by Clinton Chen. Edited by Antoinette Bishop.

Let us say the Feds come in and create stricter labeling requirements. The process before was the doodads go into the hopper and we get their whatnot, which is the mean of the doodads that went into the hopper. Before we had certainty of the supplier; we knew the population mean and standard deviation. That was enough information to decide whether the doodad was good quality or not. Since we do not know what the population distribution is, we are going to have to give people an estimate so they will make informed judgments. We must estimate the standard deviation from the sample. The sample standard deviation is some reflection of the standard deviation of the population, but it is imperfect due to sampling variability. Again, the reason we do this is because we do not know the population variance or standard deviation.

Now there are two uncertain values. We have the sample mean itself (which we knew about before) and now we have the estimated standard deviation from the sample, before we knew the mean and

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