Research Methods for the Biosciences: Interactive Exercises

Table of Contents

1. CHAPTER 1: WHERE DO I BEGIN?
2. CHAPTER 2: EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
3. CHAPTER 3: WHAT TO DO WITH RAW DATA
4. CHAPTER 4: AN INTRODUCTION TO HYPOTHESIS TESTING
5. CHAPTER 5: HYPOTHESIS TESTING: DOES MY DATA FIT AN EXPECTED RATIO?
6. CHAPTER 6: HYPOTHESIS TESTING: ASSOCIATIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS
   1. Exercise 1
   2. Exercise 2
   3. Exercise 3
7. CHAPTER 7: HYPOTHESIS TESTING: DO MY SAMPLES COME FROM THE SAME POPULATION? PARAMETRIC DATA
8. CHAPTER 8: HYPOTHESIS TESTING: DO MY SAMPLES COME FROM THE SAME POPULATION? NON-PARAMETRIC DATA
9. CHAPTER 9: RESEARCH, THE LAW AND YOU
10. CHAPTER 10: REPORTING YOUR RESEARCH

CHAPTER 6: HYPOTHESIS TESTING: ASSOCIATIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS

In this section we have included some additional examples for you to test out your understanding of the topics in this chapter. The areas each exercise covers are explained at the start of each question so that you can decide if this is a topic you would like to practice.

Cross referencing to the book uses the numbers from the sections in the book. Cross referencing to material on these web pages is always indicated by a W.

Throughout these sections we have highlighted the words that appear in our glossary. This is provided as part of this website to make it easy for you to check the meaning of these terms. If the answer to a question is a number you should enter the value up to 2 decimal places. The computer will check your answer. If it is not correct you will be able to check the calculation to see where you went wrong.

In the following interactive exercises we ask a series of questions about a particular undergraduate study. We then walk you through the steps you need to follow to answer each question. Where there are calculations you can check your answer, and see the calculation in full and see how to carry out these calculations using Excel, SPSS, and Minitab.

INTERACTIVE EXERCISE 1. EXAMPLE 6.3. The lower arm (cm) and lower leg (cm) length of a small cohort of female undergraduates

The aim of this exercise is to provide you with practice using a Spearman rank correlation (6.1) and confirm that our assertion in BOX 6.5 about the data in Example 6.3 is correct.

INTERACTIVE EXERCISE 2. EXAMPLE 6.2. Heavy metal contamination of soil under electricity pylons.

The aim of this exercise is to allow you to test your understanding of the information given in the introduction to Chapter 6. In section 6.5 we used Example 6.2 to illustrate the uses of a simple linear regression. However if you had decided that you did not wish to model the association but only wanted to test the significance of a possible association you could choose to use a correlation. This exercise considers this possibility.

INTERACTIVE EXERCISE 3. EXAMPLE W6.1. Gender and the girth of yew trees

The aim of this interactive exercise is to illustrate how useful some statistical software packages can be when you have a large data set. Therefore as far as possible the calculations in this exercise are only carried out using Excel, Minitab and SPSS. This example is also used in the interactive exercise 4 from Chapter 7. Therefore, you may wish to save your spreadsheet with the data set to be used in this additional exercise. The exercise relates to 3.8, 6.3, 6.6 and appendix b.