Question

In a meaningful and substantive manner, do you agree or disagree with the ways the choice to deal with the outliers(a, b, c)? Explain your position at length.

(a) A participant estimating ordinary people’s heights estimates one woman’s height to be “84 inches” tall.

1. Check for participant misunderstanding- the pariticipant may not have realized that this would be equivilant to seven feet, making it justifiable to exclude this peice of data.

2. Use the median as the measure of central tendency as this large data point will significantly offset the mean.

(b) In a study of memory for ordinary objects, one participant scores 0 out of 15.

1. Recheck data to make sure that the participant properly understood the instructions of the experimental design.

2. Utilize percentiles to explain data points as mean and standard deviation will be signicantly skewed as a reult of this low score.

(c) In response to a question about how many “close friends” she has, one participant writes “32.”

1. Use mode or median as measure of central tendency as to not allow outlier to affect the mean.

2. Present data in frequency table, which will properly represent that the outlier is an extreme value that only occurs one time.

Answer 1

a) The height of the woman, though might actually be 7 ft, is definitely an outlier as can be seen by comparing with other people's heights. If we are estimating ordinary people's heights, we should be interested in the average heights and not unusually outlier heights. Hence, it makes sense to either do a significance test for this observation, or use median as a measure of central tendency as this data point will distort the mean.

b) The memory for ordinary objects should not be unusually low number like 0. This can be easily concluded looking at a sample of raw data. However, removing this from the sample means we are inadvertently trying to bump up the mean. Though this does not look like representative of the sample, it should still be kept and not ignored so that we can later address such serious cases of possible memory problems. Percentile scores can definitely be used to ensure such outliers do not distort the average, and we can also present the relative positioning this way.  A Zero percentile doesn't always mean the score was 0, it just means that score was the lowest.

c) 32 friends could be possible for a person extremely well-versed in social and networking skills, but it definitely looks to be an overstatement that they are all close friends. This can be considered an outlier if we are only interested in the average "close friends" score of the participants. To take care of the outlier, one can use the mode or the median number of close friends as the average. Presenting the data in a frequency table will help identify the outlier as well.