9.52 Political bias in academia and a paired samples t-test: The following is an
ID: 3370841 • Letter: 9
Question
9.52 Political bias in academia and a paired samples t-test: The following is an excerpt from the abstract of a published research study that examined a report bias against conservatives in America academia (Fosse, Gross, & Ma, 2011)
The American professoriate contains a disproportionate number of people with liberal political views. Is this because of political bias or discrimination?…We sent two emails to directors of graduate study in the leading American departments of sociology, political science, economics, history, and English. The emails came from fictitious students who expressed interest in doing graduate work in the department…We analyze responses received in terms of frequency, timing, amount of information provided about the department, emotional warmth, and enthusiasm toward the student. (p. 1)
One of the fictional emails was from a fictional student who mentioned working on the presidential campaign of John McCain, a well-known conservative, and one was from a fictional student who mentioned working on the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, a well-known liberal. The researchers conducted a series of paired-samples t tests, but did not find statistically significant differences on the various measures between the conservative and liberal students.
c.) What are the dependent variables, as listed in the study description, and what kind of variables are they?
D.) Explain why it would have been possible to conduct a paired-samples t test.
E.) Was the p value likely to be lower than or higher than 0.05? Explain your answer.
F.) Given that the results were not statistically significant, what additional information would you want to know to determine whether there was sufficient statistical power?
Explanation / Answer
(c) The dependent variables of the study as listed in the description are
(d) A paired samples t-test is possible here because we are testing the quality of response of the particular department for the students with two different political ideologies.
Since the same department would be responding to the two mails (one mail of the fictional student who worked on the presidential campaign of John McCain, a well-known conservative, and one from a fictional student who mentioned working on the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who is a liberal) we can perform a two sample t-test to check the difference in the response of the department for the two students with exposure to different political ideas.
(e) Since from the test it was found that the result was not a statistically significant difference of the various measures of the responses given to the conservative and liberal students so it will be expected that the p-value will be greater than 0.05 because it is only when the p-value is greater than the level of significance we accept the null hypothesis that is, no difference.
(f) To calculate the statistical power we need the sample size and the effect size.
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