Problem Descriiption
A researcher wants to examine the exercise habits of college students. The researcher develops a survey to test the following research questions:
Do males and females differ in the average amount of time they currently spend exercising?
Does the amount of time students report currently exercising differ from the amount of time (a) they plan on exercising over the winter break and (b) the amount of time they exercised over summer break?
Does the average college student get at least 3 hours of exercise each week?
Instructions
Step 1: Open the Data File in SPSS
If you have SPSS on your computer or are using one of the school computers to complete this assignment, click on the Data File link above (in the Resources needed to complete this assignment section above). When you click on the link you will be taken to the file which is located on the Google drive, if you then download the file you asked what program you want to open the file with, if SPSS isn’t the default change it to open the file with SPSS. Or you can download the file to the desktop or a flash drive and then open the file through SPSS.
If you are using NetLabs to complete the assignment. First log into NetLabs and schedule an SPSS lab, once you are in the SPSS lab, click on the SPSS tab at the top. Once the virtual desktop is visible, open a web-browser (e.g., Chrome or Firefox), log into your Canvas account, pull up the assignment instructions, then click on the Data file link above (in the Resources needed to complete this assignment section above).
Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the questions that were included in the survey.
Once the data file is open in SPSS, go to variable view, read the variable labels and variable values to help you understand the questions included in the survey.
Step 3: Participant section.
To write the participants paragraph for the assignment you will need to run descriiptive statistics to characterize the participants gender, age, and ethnicity.
Before running the statistics you will need to decide what the most appropriate descriiptive statistics are for each of the variables: gender, age, and ethnicity (if you are uncertain you might want to refer to your M03 notes).
As a reminder, instructions on how to create a frequency distribution in SPSS can be found in Module 2 and instructions on how to run descriiptive statistics can be found in the Module 3 sections of the SPSS Instructions Guide.
Once you have the frequency distributions and descriiptive statistics, then you can use the information to write the participant section. An example participant section can be found in the APA formatting guidelines. (Links to an external site.)Your participant section should look very similar to the example paragraph. The participant section should be the very first paragraph of your paper. The section needs to have the word “Participants” as a subheading. The subheading should be flush left and in bold face font and should be placed on the very first line of page one of the assignment.
Before submitting the assignment please review any feedback that was given on the participants paragraph on the first SPSS assignment.
Step 4: Results section.
To test the three research questions:
Do males and females differ in the average amount of time they currently spend exercising?
Does the amount of time students report currently exercising differ from the amount of time (a) they plan on exercising over the winter break and (b) the amount of time they exercised over summer break?
Does the average college student get at least 3 hours of exercise each week?
You will need to first, determine what t-test is most appropriate to test each question.
I will give you a hint, each of the three questions will be analyzed with a different t-test. Also for the second research question, you will need to run the t-test that you selected twice, once to compare the current hours to the winter hours, and once to compare the current hours to the summer hours.
Once you have determined which t-test to run for each of the three questions, use the Module 6, 7, and 8 videos as well as the instructions in the SPSS Guide to run the tests.
Once you have run all four of the t-tests, then you are ready to write the results section. The result section should immediately follow the participant section. With the header “Results” centered on the first line and the results of each of the four t-tests summarized in a separate paragraphs. For an example of how to write-up the results of each of the three different t-tests that were performed following the APA formatting guidelines see the APA formatting guidelines (Links to an external site.)handout.
Step 5: Exporting the output and creating Appendix A
All of the tables generated in steps 3 and 4 need to be included in your paper in an appendix. The appendix should be placed at the end of your paper (after all of your write-up). The appendix should start on a new page and should have the heading Appendix A.
To create the appendix you will need to export all of the tables that were created in SPSS to a Word document (.doc or .docx). To export the output to a Word document, once you are finished with all analyses in SPSS, in the SPSS output window go to File then Export, in the Export window select your flash drive or desktop as the desired location for the exported file and save the file.
Once the output has been exported to a Word document, you will need to clean the file by removing extra spaces, syntax, and any “Notes” sections. Add an APA formatted title for each table and graph, and add the heading “Appendix A” to the first line of the output.
