2022 Introduction to Statistics in Research Mitchell 2nd ed

I N T R O T O R E S E A R C H : D A T A V I S U A L I Z A T I O N & C O M M O N S T A T T E S T S

Survey- Interpreting Visuals

Many of you may have conducted a Likert Scale survey for your master thesis. Once you have data, it’s a good idea to visualize it to see if you have some differences. You can do this with histograms, but I want to demonstrate how to interpret visuals and information from statistical software (using JMP and SPSS in this example). Let’s review the preliminary information (note that this is fictitious data).

Location: ABC College

Study: ABC College collected data from their students to gauge their mental health. Demographics include male or female, age, and level in college, along with questions to determine potential mental health issues.

Likert Scale : categories 5=Very often, 4=Often, 3= Sometimes, 2=Rarely, 1=Never

Preliminary Observation : Discovered some patterns from the data with the very first question.

Question 1: Stress-Restless1: "I feel stressed and overwhelmed."

Essentially, females have a mean of 3.9 and males 4.4. Are these means significantly different?

Table 44: JMP Software, Analyze, then Tabulate

The sample size is 474 with 50% for females and 50% for males. This is a count of the responses. Remember 2 = rarely, 4 = often and 5 = very often.

Even without running the chi-square test, you may see that there is an issue.

Table 45: SPSS Software: Analyze, Descriptive Statistics, Crosstabs

Next, the researcher wanted to check if the male responses are significantly different from the female responses. The researcher chose Chi-Square in SPSS (showing the responses are

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