What's she saying to her dog? What category would her statement fall into? Photo Credit: Shift Drive/Shutterstock This entertaining article quotes several cute examples of how people talk to their dogs while they are out in public. The author, Alexandra Horowitz, is a psychologist who studies dog cognition. She has been recording the snippets of …
Category: Chapter 06; Surveys and Observations
Which Ice Cream Flavor Are You?
Many flavors, many personalities: How could we test whether an ice cream personality test is reliable and valid? Photo credit: Okanmetin/Getty Images At the height of summer, we all start considering the same, timeless question: Can your personality can be accurately summarized by an ice cream flavor? This Buzzfeed poll asks you to answer a …
Which brand of car is the most reliable?
How might advertisers operationalize the concept of "reliability" in ways favorable to their own brand? Credit: BNFWork/Shutterstock You may have seen these ads on TV: Real people stand in a warehouse and are asked which cars are "most reliable." A Honda driver might predict, "Hondas are the most reliable." But then the cover is whisked …
How much do chimpanzees cooperate?
Which behaviors were used to operationalize cooperation in chimps? Photo credit: apple2499/Shutterstock Human beings are a fundamentally prosocial and cooperative species, but what about one of our close relatives, the chimpanzee? A science writer summarized a series of studies on chimpanzees who live in the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary, in the Republic of the Congo. The …
Question wording matters
Collecting accurate data in a poll is difficult business. Many of us focus on the sampling strategies of polling organizations, and rightly so: External validity depends on whether we include "cell phone only" numbers in our samples, how we account for different rates of responding across certain groups, and so on. However, this post reminds …
Online resource: Writing good questions
Here's a second video in a series by Pew Research. This 5 minute clip describes some of the issues in writing good questions for an opinion poll. It basically summarizes the first part of Chapter 6, and provides some new, concrete examples. You can use this in combination with Pew's first video about random sampling, …
How fast do people talk? Depends on where you live….
How fast do people talk? How wordy are they? Do they swear a lot? Photo credit: Eugenio Marongiu/Shutterstock There's a new piece in the Atlantic summarizing some research on phone calls. The journalist's piece is tantalizing, but it doesn't provide some of the information you need to evaluate the research behind it. According to the …
Continue reading How fast do people talk? Depends on where you live….
Meow! “Viewing cat videos boosts energy and mood” Really?
This respondent said that watching cat videos causes her mood to improve. What do you think? Photo: Rasulovs/Thinkstock. Here's a provocative headline from Medical News Today: Viewing cat videos boosts energy and positive emotions. That sounds like exciting news to me: The causal claim implies that we should watch some of those cute kitty videos …
Continue reading Meow! “Viewing cat videos boosts energy and mood” Really?
Thinking critically about data graphics
There's a fun interactive datagraphic on gallup.com's website. It's called "State of the States." You can select a polling variable, such as "overall well-being," "support for Obama," or "religiosity," and it will show you how each U.S. state scores on that variable. Feel free to take a minute to play with the interactive right now. …
What ends up on the Yelp Top 100 list?
What construct and external validity considerations affect Yelp ratings, like this 4-star review of a restaurant near my campus? Screenshot from Yelp website (by author) In this interesting piece, Slate writer Will Oremus asks why the top-rated restaurants on Yelp are places that "nobody has ever heard of." He explains that the top 10 rated …