Question

A child care organization commissioned a random survey to identify attitudes toward child-raising. A topic of interest was the difference between the beliefs of men and women regarding discipline. The follow table reports data on men’s and women’s attitudes toward spanking.
Attitudes toward Spanking by Respondent Gender
Favor Spanking
Male
Female
Strongly
115
107
Somewhat
212
221
Oppose
73
109
Strongly oppose
18
42
Chi-square = 13.1, degrees of freedom = 3, significance = 0.004.

State the alternative hypothesis and the null hypothesis that could be tested with the data in this table.
2. Identify the independent and the dependent variables.
3. Calculate percentages and include in them in a table. Write a sentence to describe the relationship shown in the table. Do the data in the table support or contradict your hypothesis? Explain.
4. Based on the chi-square evidence what would you do, that is, would you reject the null hypothesis?

Answer 1

Null Hypothesis: Attitude towards spanking and gender are independent of each other

Alternate Hypothesis: Attitude towards spanking and gender are dependent

2. The independent variable is the gender. The dependent variable is the attitude towards spanking

3. The percentages are shown in the below table: (Row %, Column %)

From the data table it seems like there is a relationship between the variables. The females oppose the attitude towards spanking more than males. The data in the table supports the alternate hypothesis that there is a relationship between variables because the %ages of Oppose & Strongly Oppose attitude are 32% for females vis a vis 21% for males.

4. The chi-square statistic is 13.1 and p-value is 0.004. hence, we reject the null hypothesis and say that the variables are dependent.