Lesson 1

The goal of this laboratory is to get you familiar with the concepts of:

- Population

- Sample

- Parameter

- Statistic

As well as help you to distinguish between levels of measurement:

- Nominal

- Ordinal

- Interval

- Ratio

And finally to describe the difference between classes of variables:

- Qualitative/Quantitative

- Continuous/Categorical

Download and import the file “lesson1.txt” that can be found on the website along with this lesson. If
you are having trouble importing the file, go back to the previous lesson to learn how to import a text
file. This is a fictional dataset, but let’s say it represents data from all of the hospital admissions over a
10 yr. period of statewide cardiac ICU hospital admissions. The variables included represent:

1). Gender of subject

2). New York Heart Association Heart Failure Class of each subject

3). Date of Admission

4). Weight of subject at time of admission

How does this survey differ from one that would usually be conducted by a more typical research team?
Answer the following questions about this dataset to help find out:

1). How many observations do you see in this file?

2). Circle all that apply:

a. The GENDER variable is:

 Nominal Ordinal Interval Ratio

Qualitative Quantitative

Continuous Categorical

b. the NYHA Heart Failure Class variable is:

Continuous Categorical

c. the Date of Admission variable is:

Nominal Ordinal Interval Ratio

d. the Weight of Subject at time of admission is:

Nominal Ordinal Interval Ratio

Qualitative Quantitative

Continuous Categorical

This data represents an entire statewide cross-section of information. It is a complete dataset

from the entire state population and would be very costly to assemble. Researchers don’t have access to
this amount of data except in rare circumstances. The US census attempts to assemble information from
the entire population every ten years and needs an entire government department to do it. Let’s say
we’re interested in knowing the average weight of subjects that have been admitted to cardiac ICU’s over
this ten year period in the entire state. Since we have this dataset, it’s not very difficult to answer that
question. Click on the “Analyze” Menu, followed by “Descriptive Statistics”, and then “Descriptives”, as
shown here:

This will result in a table like to following popping up:

 Descriptive Statistics

N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation

wt 10000 172.33563157 247.43160594 210.009681736 10.05286172188

2
Valid N (listwise) 10000

From this table, you can clearly see that the population mean is 210 lbs.

Now, what would happen if we were a poor, struggling nursing professor interested in
writing a grant that dealt with this measurement and didn’t have the resources available to find
data from all admissions in the entire state? The answer is we’d have to take a sample of data,
either by phone, internet or some other manner and estimate the population mean with our
sample mean.

Let’s try doing that in SPSS. We’re going to select a random sample of the data from this
dataset right inside of the software. To do so, go to the “Data Menu”, followed by “Select
Cases”, as shown here:

This will bring up the following window, in which case we will select the “wt” variable
and “Random sample of cases”.
 To define our sample, click “Sample…”, which will bring up the next window:

In this window, type “1000” into the box after “Exactly” and 10,000 into the next box. Then hit
“Continue” and “Okay”. The computer randomly selects 1000 cases for us, which makes our screen look
like this:
 There are now a bunch of cases that have been crossed out on the left and a new “filter”
variable as shown above. Now, go back and request a “Descriptives” table as we did before. This will
show a table that looks something like this:

Descriptive Statistics

N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation

wt 1000 180.29881653 243.81648201 209.949296404 10.22023479108

5
Valid N (listwise) 1000

Notice, I said it will look something like this. This is because your random sample will be
different than mine, so your numbers will be slightly different than mine. Look at the new descriptive
table. Can you see how many observations it based it’s calculations on? There are 1000. The mean of
this dataset is 209.949. Now, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Review Questions:

1). How large is the population in this study?

2). How large of a sample did we take?

3). What was the population mean?

4). What was the sample mean?

5). Is the population mean a parameter or a statistic?

6). Is the sample mean a parameter or a statistic?

Now that you are done looking at your random sample I am going to suggest that you DO NOT SAVE IT!
Many students forget that they have selected some of the cases and continue on to the rest of their SPSS
lessons running their work only on this sample of 1000. That won’t work. The rest of the SPSS lessons
go back to using the original sample you imported and saved after the Introduction so that is what you
want to make sure you have going forward. To just check yourself when you run SPSS lesson two make
sure your N is back to 10,000 not the 1,000 selected cases you just identified. I hope this saves you some
aggravation and frustration! Good luck with lesson 2!