Methods Paper
Robert Slade
PSY/335
June-27-2016
Karen Hoeve
Methods Paper
On this team paper my part is to talk about whether I will use descriptive statistics or inferential statistics to our research question and hypothesis. The research question once again is, “Workplace bullying and job performance,”? and the hypothesis is, “Bullying and its effect on job satisfaction and work productivity.” What are descriptive and inferential statistics? “Descriptive statistics provide the summarizing and systematizing functions. The two main types of descriptive statistics are measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion (variability),” (Elmes, Kantowitz, Roediger, III, 2006-2012). Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary (2012), defined inferential statistics as, “statistics from which an inference is made about the nature of a population; the purpose is to generalize about the population, based on data from the sample selected from the population.”
While I am sure that both types of statistic have their advantages the system that I would rather use for our team experiment is descriptive statistics. The reason for me choosing this statistic is clearly because I do not understand the word inferential, I can understand it a little from reading about it but not enough to really understand what the word is. My plans would be to use descriptive statistics so an analysis could be concluded at the end of the experiment. With the questions that we as team came up with, the way that I would go about testing for answers would be through a survey. The survey would question the population or the particular group that the experiment is on with questions that would inquire about bullying in the workplace. From this experiment we would be able to conclude the statistics from how often bullying occurs in the work place, if drugs play a role in these instances, and how is the employees work performance affected.
References:
Elmes D., Kantowitz B., Roediger H.,...