Lab Exercise #10

Include tables and figures relating to results as relevant. Text and tables should be APA formatted. You do need to ensure that you provide any relevant information (e.g. N, the test statistic, significance values). You may include SPSS output in an appendix at the end of your paper-this may help you to receive partial credit on some questions.

You will find the data you need (Mireault.sav) as well as a description of the data set.

1. (5 points). Briefly state the major way in which the distributions of somatization and depression variables differ. In one or two sentences, describe why this difference is important.
2. (10 points). You believe that having a parent die during childhood increases the risk for depressive symptoms. Use the current data to calculate how many participants you would need to have power of .80 to find a significant (alpha=.05) increase in depression associated with this risk factor.
3. (15 points). Many researchers are only interested in whether people are so deviant that they are likely to qualify for a particular diagnosis. For somatization, obsessive compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation and psychoticism symptoms, create new variables in which everyone above 70 (two standard deviations above the mean T-score from the normative sample) is "diagnosed" positive and everyone equal to or below 70 is negative. Is there a relationship between having a parent die and a pathological level of any of the above variables? Present results in tabular form with a brief written summary. Briefly describe some of the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy relative to using continuous T-scores.
4. Provide a table illustrating the relationship between the "diagnoses" of depression and anxiety.

1. (5 points). Is this relationship significant?

(5 points). How strong is the relationship between depression and anxiety? Is this relationship higher in women or men? (You do not need to test whether this difference is significant—you only need to tell me if it appears the relationship is different and the direction)

c. (5 points). What is the odds ratio associated with being anxious relative to whether or not you are depressed? Interpret your findings with reference to how this statistic is different from the relative risk.

5. Research suggests that if an individual feels supported by his/her family and friends, s/he is less likely to develop depression.

1. (5 points). According to this data, is support predictive of how an individual scores on a depression measure?
2. (5 points). Using the operationalization presented in question 3, does support predict a "diagnosis" of depression?
3. (10 points). One of my colleagues believes that anxiety is also important for predicting someone's depression score. Add anxiety to your model from question 5a. Is my colleague right that I will have a better model if I include anxiety? Provide a table supporting your opinion

6. I have some questions about the associations between variables. In other words, I am not trying to predict, I just want to know whether variables are related to one another.

1. (5 points). I believe that individuals who lost a parent at a young age are going to be more likely to also be paranoid at a later age. Is there support for this hypothesis?
2. (10 points). Similarly, is there a relationship between a participant's age at loss and a "diagnosis" of paranoia?
3. (10 points). Is there a relationship between gender and score on the paranoia measure?

7. (10 points). Using this data set, please answer ONLY ONE of the following questions:

a.' I believe that people who have lost a parent (regardless of whether this loss is through death or through divorce) will have a different relationship between anxiety and perceived vulnerability to loss than people who have not lost a parent. So, in other words, does loss moderate the relationship between anxiety and perceived vulnerability to loss?

OR

b. I believe that for people who have experienced a loss of a parent (regardless of whether this loss is through death or through divorce) that perceived vulnerability to loss leads to paranoia, and this paranoia then leads to obsessive thinking. In other words, does paranoia mediate the relationship between perceived vulnerability to loss and obsession?

Mireault.sav

Mireault (1990) collected data from 381 college students, some of whom had lost a parent by death during their childhood. She had three groups of students. Group 1 was composed of participants who had lost a parent. Group 2 was composed of participants whose parents were still alive and married to each other. Group 3 consisted of students whose parents were divorced.

Mireault was interested in observing the effects of parental loss on the person's current level of symptomatology (as measured by the Brief Symptoms Inventory, Derogatis, 1983) and on the individual's self-perceived vulnerability to future loss. This data set only contains the total vulnerability measure, and not the subscales. There is also a single measure for social support. For all measures, a higher score represents more of the concept being measured. Missing data are represented by a blank cell (these will contain just a period).

Price: $33.87

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 20 pages, 1387 words and 39 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document