Title: Assignment: Mini Project 3
Course: PSYC 301 Statistical Methods in Psychol

For Mini Project 3 we are going to work with hypothetical data about how people might react to the relaxing of stay at home orders. At one point a few weeks ago, Maryland had stay at home orders in place and only essential businesses are allowed to be open. In West Virginia that had relaxed and many businesses were opening.

Our hypothesis is that people will adhere more closely to social distancing guidelines of standing 6 feet from others when in a state that still had businesses closed compared to a state where businesses had opened.

The idea is that people start to feel that things are 'back to normal' just because of the relaxing of that unrelated restriction, and are less likely to be strict about the distancing rule.

I am imagining we set out to measure the distances people stand behind a person who is being attended to at the Chicken Coop Mobile kitchen when it visits Keyser, WV and when it visits Cumberland, MD. These towns are not far from each other with similar demographics and economies.

In both cases we imagine we are watching people standing in line to pick up orders at the window and have marked the ground in a covert way so that it is easy for us to tell from our car about 30 feet away how far people are from each other.  We have a system for picking people more or less randomly based on a random amount of time from ending recording data for one person to beginning recording data for another person. In both cases we watch at the truck for 1 hour.

Specifically, after identifying the moment in time, the person who is next in line to pay for their order is observed to see how far back they stand from the person presently at the window.

The data has three columns. An ID column, a State column indicating which state and its social distancing status, and the distance noted in each observation.

Now to jamovi!

Click to download this file and load it into jamovi. The file name is queuing.omv.

Do the following steps.

1. Select the Analyses tab
2. Select T-tests and the option Independent Samples T-tests.
3. Select Descriptives (that's where you will get means, standard deviations, and N)
4. Select State and put it in the Grouping Variable box.
5. Select Distance and put it in the Dependent Variable box.
6. Write down the Means, standard deviations, and Ns for each group
7. Write down the calculated t statistic, degrees of freedom (df) and p-value.

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You now have the results of a t-test of the data for this project that then yields the probability of that observed data having come from the null hypothesis distribution (the distribution of there being no difference in distances between folks), along with the means and standard deviations of the two groups of folks.

That means you can now write a short report using Microsoft Word (which is available via Office 365 through your browser access to your email).

Your report will have the following sections:

1. introduction and method
2. results
3. discussion

You are NOT writing an APA report because this is much simpler than that and more direct. The most important thing for you to know is this: While we talk in statistics about null and alternative hypotheses, we NEVER use those two terms in writing our reports. Never. We only speak of our research hypothesis and how the statistical test is either supportive or not supportive of our research hypothesis.

Mentioning the null or alternative hypothesis will result in lost points.

In the introduction and method you are describing IN YOUR OWN WORDS the basic issue being examined and how the data was collected.

In the results we are describing the basic finding of the statistical test. Include the following:

1. Create a table that shows the mean, standard deviation, and N for each of the two groups in the study. Make it neat and readable.
2. Write a sentence that describes the results of the t-test.  Not presenting the results of the t-test in proper form will result in lost points. The textbook on page 258 gives guidance on writing results of t-tests. Also, go to this webpage for guidance for writing result of t-tests. Or this page.

Because there are very few ways to write the results of a statistical test, plagiarism in phrasing is not considered an issue there, generally.

In the discussion write about what the statistical test means in the context of the research hypothesis. That is, there is a research hypothesis, what do our findings tell us about that research hypothesis?

Each of these sections is going to be about two to five sentences long. This is a very short document.

Save the file and submit it using the submission link for this assignment.