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Thu 31 Dec, 2015 04:23 pm
My topic was: Are there significant multitasking differences between males and females?
I had a total of 90 subjects (45 males and 45 females) play an online game. The game consisted of levels, and their score (that they received once they lost) was in the form of a number (for example: 49 or 105 or 65, etc. I also had each subject play the game four times (for four trials) and report the score each time.
So a typical "Score Sheet" looked like this:
Practice Trial 1: 18
Trial 1: 34
Trial 2: 58
Trail 3: 42
I was thinking, for each subject, of first taking the average of their THREE HIGHEST SCORES and counting that as their "Final Score" For example, the "Final Score" of the above subject would be: 44.6666 ...that would be his/her "Final Score".....then, I find the mean of all males' Final Scores and the mean of all females' Final scores. This mean for each gender is what I will use in my statistical test. For instance, say Johnny has a mean of 44.666 and David a mean of 47.888 and then Rocky a mean of 43.2222 and same for females. In this case, I was thinking to use a T-test independent sample.
However, I wanted to know....Is this allowed, to take the average of each persons 3 highest scores or is there some other statistical test I have to do before moving on to the T-Test . I know in the t-test you have to take the average of all male scores and all female scores.....(for instance, take the average Johnny, David and Rocky's MEAN scores and the average of all the individual female MEAN scores)
By the way, I've never taken a statistics class in my life....this is for my Research class and our teacher somehow expects us to know about statistical analysis (I just found out what a T-test was a couple of minutes ago through Google and Youtube....I have no clue how to even begin or carry out a T-test, but I'll just have to figure it out ) Thank you! What do you think I should do?
@rasofia,
I'm not sure why you're using the three highest scores. Are there cases in which the analysis uses only the top three scores?
Would there be a significant difference if all scores were used?
@rasofia,
(1) Yes, you are allowed to take the top three scores (or two scores or one score) as long as you are consistent. It would also be interesting to see if the scores go up with experience and if that is gender specific. For example, men might do poorly on the first test, but get better quickly with experience while women may start higher right out of the gate. If you choose to exclude a subset of the data, you need to explain why you did it. You could say you tossed the first trial because it was for familiarization, but I wouldn't necessarily toss the lowest.
(2) You should plot the histogram of both the men's and women's scores and test for normality. You should always plot data like this and include the plots in your final report.
(3) Assuming normality or something close to that, you can use a t-test on your final metric. Something else you could do would be to do an ANOVA using all the data where the independent variables are gender and trial number.
@engineer,
Of coarse, consistency is the key for doing any analysis.
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