Q5 In no less than 5 sentences explain a research idea you w

Q5.) In no less than 5 sentences, explain a research idea you would test using hypothesis testing with an independent samples t test. Be sure to identify your independent (IV) and dependent (DV) variables, and report your null and alternative hypotheses. Why are you interested in this particular research question?

Solution

A t-test helps you compare whether two groups have different average values (for example, whether men and women have different average heights)

Let’s say you’re curious about whether boys and girls in a hostel spend a different amount of money per month on movies. It’s impractical to ask every student about their movie spending, so instead you ask a sample of each—maybe 300 boy students and 300 girl students—and the averages are $10 and $12. The t-test asks whether that difference is probably representative of a real difference between the two sets generally or whether that is most likely a meaningless statistical fluke.

To test this we resort to statistical evidence.

Set up null and alternate hypotheses as:

H0: The two means are equal

Ha: The two means are not equal

The samples can be treated as independent if you think the two groups are independent of spending on movies.

If there were in fact no difference between the two groups, what are the chances that randomly selected groups from those populations would be as different as these randomly selected groups are?

Definition

A t-test asks whether a difference between two groups’ averages is unlikely to have occurred because of random chance in sample selection. A difference is more likely to be meaningful and “real” if
(1) the difference between the averages is large,
(2) the sample size is large, and
(3) responses are consistently close to the average values and not widely spread out (the standard deviation is low).

The t-test’s statistical significance and the t-test’s effect size are the two primary outputs of the t-test. Statistical significance indicates whether the difference between sample averages is likely to represent an actual difference between populations (as in the example above), and the effect size indicates whether that difference is large enough to be practically meaningful.