Thread: Quantitative Methods

1. Quantitative Methods

How do I go about analyzing this scenario?

Consider the following:
You’ve been hired by a company who is interested in finding a way to decrease incidents of offensive interpersonal behavior at work. The company has identified one department that seems to have a big problem with offensive interpersonal behavior. The company hopes to resolve this problem by putting all of the employees in this department through a training course. The company measures their offensiveness (on a scale of 1 indicating no offensiveness to 20 indicating highly offensive) both before (pre) and after (post) the training course. The company also provided the rank of the employees, with 1 = manager and 2 = employee.

 Family Name Pre-Training Post-Training Rank Taub 6 3 2 Hadley 5 5 2 Cameron 10 9 1 House 17 15 1 Wilson 2 3 1 Cuddy 12 10 1 Foreman 15 13 1 Volakis 6 4 2 Chase 9 4 2

1. Before they begin their analysis, the company wants to know whether the sample of employees in this study had different levels of offensiveness before the study compared to other individuals in the organization. For the purposes of this study, the overall organization should be considered the population of interest. The company knows that in this organization, employees typically engage in an average of 7 incidents of offensive interpersonal behavior at work with a standard deviation of 3 incidents. Does this sample of employees engage in a significantly different number of incidents of offensive interpersonal behavior before the study (Pre-training) than employees in the organization?

How to calculate the appropriate test

The company is interested in testing your intervention on a department who has significantly more incidents of interpersonal offensiveness than in the overall organization. Should they proceed with their analysis using this department? Why or why not?

2. The company wants to know whether the training was able to reduce offensiveness for its employees. Based on the data provided above, determine whether offensiveness after the training (Post-Training) was lower than offensiveness before the training (Pre-Training).

a. Calculate the appropriate test

If appropriate, calculate a confidence interval.

Report a formal conclusion

3. The company wants to know whether the training was more effective for managers than it was for employees. Based on the data provided above, determine whether there were lower incidents of offensiveness after training (Post-Training) for managers than there were for employees (Rank).

How to calculate the appropriate test

State a formal test of the hypothesis

4. One of the researchers has expressed some concern that the results from #3 might have been influenced by individual differences in this sample. Is this a reasonable concern? Why or why not?

Any help is much appreciated. :-)

2. Re: Quantitative Methods

So the appropriate test is the t-test, or z-test.

Here is what I have:

x numbers represent pre-training.
y numbers represent post-training.

Sx = 82
Mx = 9.11

Sx^2 = 24.11

Sy = 66
My = 7.33

Sy^2 = 20.75

After calculating the square root of Sx^2 and Sy^2, I obtain t = 0.16, which is statistically significant.

Am I on the right track?
{"found_math": false, "script_math_tex": 0, "script_math_asciimath": 0, "math_annotations": 0, "math_alttext": 0, "mathml": 0, "mathjax_tag": 0, "mathjax_inline_tex": 0, "mathjax_display_tex": 0, "mathjax_asciimath": 0, "img_math": 0, "codecogs_latex": 0, "wp_latex": 0, "mimetex.cgi": 0, "/images/math/codecogs": 0, "mathtex.cgi": 0, "katex": 0, "math-container": 0, "wp-katex-eq": 0, "align": 0, "equation": 0, "x-ck12": 0, "texerror": 0}