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Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS
Statistics, 5e Exam 2026-2027 Exam Test
Questions And Verified Answers
Categorical variable - ✔ANSWER✔-any variable made up of
categories of objects/entities. Ex: The university you attend:
students who attend the University of Sussex are not also
enrolled at Harvard or UV Amsterdam, therefore, students fall
into distinct categories.
Central limit theorem - ✔ANSWER✔-this theorem states that
when samples are large (above about 30) the sampling
distribution will take the shape of a normal distribution
regardless of the shape of the population from which the sample
was drawn. For small samples the tdistribution better
approximates the shape of the sampling distribution. We also
know from this theorem that the standard deviation of the
sampling distribution (i.e., the standard error of the sample
mean) will be equal to the standard deviation of the sample (s)
divided by the square root of the sample size (N).
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Central tendency - ✔ANSWER✔-a generic term describing the
centre of a frequency distribution of observations as measured
by the mean, mode and median.
Centring - ✔ANSWER✔-the process of transforming a variable
into deviations around a fixed point. This fixed point can be any
value that is chosen, but typically a mean is used. To centre a
variable the mean is subtracted from each score. See grand mean
centring, group mean centring.
Chartjunk - ✔ANSWER✔-superfluous material that distracts
from the data being displayed on a graph.
Chi-square distribution - ✔ANSWER✔-a probability
distribution of the sum of squares of several normally distributed
variables. It tends to be used to test hypotheses about categorical
data, and to test the fit of models to the observed data.
Chi-square test - ✔ANSWER✔-Generally refers to Pearson's __
__ of the independence of two categorical variables. Essentially
it tests whether two categorical variables forming a contingency
table are associated.
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Cochran's Q - ✔ANSWER✔-This test is an extension of
McNemar's test and is basically a Friedman's ANOVA for
dichotomous data.
Ex: You asked 10 people whether they'd like to shoot Justin
Timberlake, David Beckham and Simon Cowell and they could
answer only 'yes' or 'no'. If we coded responses as 0 (no) and 1
(yes) we could use this.
Coefficient of determination - ✔ANSWER✔-the proportion of
variance in one variable explained by a second variable. It is
Pearson's correlation coefficient squared.
Cohen's d - ✔ANSWER✔-An effect size that expresses the
difference between two means in standard deviation units. In
general it can be estimated using:
Common factor - ✔ANSWER✔-a factor that affects all
measured variables and, therefore, explains the correlations
between those variables.
Common variance - ✔ANSWER✔-variance shared by two or
more variables.