Exam 10: A Synopsis of Selected Statistical Tests for Examining Ordinal Data

When you want to know whether teachers, school Principals, and school psychologists differ in their level of commitment to test based performance, and if you have measured their commitment at the ordinal level, you have:

The Mann-Whitney U test tells you whether two groups differ on their responses to an:

The Kruskal-Wallis test does not generate a p value to determine the level of statistical significance.

When you have a correlation coefficient of .88 (p < .001), it means:

Spearman rank correlation coefficient is used when the data are drawn from dependent samples.

The Mann-Whitney U test determines:

The Spearman rank correlation coefficient ranks the study subjects on each variable and compares these ranks to compute the coefficient.

If you are interested in determining whether there is a significant relationship between an ordinal variable and a nominal variable with more than two categories when the data are drawn from independent samples, you will employ:

When you have an ordinal variable such as order of preferences for an event and another variable such as gender that is dichotomous from independent samples, you will choose which one of the following for your statistical analysis?

The test that can be used in a one-group pretest-posttest study in which the data on the client's behavior which is considered dependent variable is measured at the ordinal level is:

If you wanted to test the effectiveness of a program of peer mentoring in which youth at risk are matched with mentors to pursue STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology & Math) majors and stay college bound, you can measure the effectiveness of this program by asking the respondents to indicate the level of their interest in pursuing college degree. You could compute a mean rank to that interest in pursuing a college degree in the STEM field was higher after participation in the mentoring services than before. The Wilcoxon test would then determine whether the increased interest in pursuing a degree in the STEM field as indicated in the posttest ranks is significantly different from those of the pretest.

In a study where school teachers were asked to rate themselves on an ordinal scale for their job satisfaction and the teachers were also asked to provide the rating for their supervisors on an ordinal scale, in order to establish if there is a correlation between these two variables you will use:

Spearman rank correlation generates a coefficient:

The Mann-Whitney U test calculates a value for U from which:

Explain the importance of statistical significance in Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance.

The Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed ranks test is a means of examining the relationship between a dichotomous nominal variable and an ordinal variable:

When you want to compare groups on a given variable such as happiness, you could first compute the mean for each group for happiness to see which group was highest and then determine whether the differences among them are significant by employing the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance.

Spearman rank correlation coefficient provides you with a coefficient for data measured at the:

Statistical significance can be computed for Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance.

An evaluative researcher wants to know whether three different groups of professionals employed by a child welfare agency differ with regard to their level of job satisfaction, and he/she has measured job satisfaction at the ordinal level. In this situation, you have a nominal variable with three categories and an ordinal variable. Please explain the test you will use and the rationale for the choice of your statistical test.