Question

The 2014 General Social Survey asked randomly selected 1475 subjects how many hours per day they watched TV, on average. We want to test whether there are differences in population means according to the marital status of the subject. The data set TVdata contains three variables (TVhours, status).

a) identify the explanatory variable and response variable and explain why

Answer 1

The Data Set contains two variables : TVhours and Status

Now before i say which one is response and which one is explanatory variable let me explain the reasoning

We want to test whether there are differences in population means according to the marital status of the subject which implies that does hours spend on TV depend on marital status

For understanding purposes lets take an example

Example:

Lets assume under marital status there are 2 options : Single and Married

We want to know "Does average TVhours of Single person is greater than of a married person?"

In the example we want to know if the TVhours depends on whether they are married or single

Now clearly we can say the TVhours are the dependent variable while the Status are the independent variable and as we know dependent variable are also called response variable and independent variable are called explanatory variable.

So, we can conclude that the TVhours is the explanatory variable and Status is the response variable