Tuesday, November 4, 2008

question about the write-up

As I am looking at my powerpoint notes, I noticed that the write-up talks about "higher education weakly but significantly predicted lower happiness" and later "Age was also found to signicficantly predict happiness, with older respondents slightly but significantly less happy." I am assuming these are referring to the unstandardized betas and obviously the significance values.
My question is how else to state/explain the differences in unstd. betas as we look at six different variables. I started to say in my own write up that one had a slightly stronger correlation than the other or that the strongest variable correlated was such and such. I'm afriad this is too close to the dreaded "better predicts" that Dr. Clements told us to avoid and that correlated isnt the right description??
Is it important that we differentiate between unstd. betas as we do our write up, or is it enough to say that they all significantly predicted self worth or all but such and such sig. predicted?

Thanks...

1 comment:

Mari said...

"I started to say in my own write up that one had a slightly stronger correlation than the other or that the strongest variable correlated was such and such. I'm afriad this is too close to the dreaded "better predicts" that Dr. Clements told us to avoid and that correlated isn't the right description??"

That is a correct conclusion. Unless you compare the betas using an additional test, which you must compute by hand, you cannot say that one predictor predicted BETTER (or worse) than another. Note also that this is not necessary to do. Provide the information about the prediction obtained by each predictor on each step of the equation in your table, and discuss these findings in the writeup, noting (but not repeating numbers for) which were significant and which were not.