Lab Assignment

Lab Assignment 3

 A sports psychologist believes that amount of practice is related to performance.  She measures the hours of basketball free-throw practice time of several players, and then free-throw performance in a game.  The data are as follows:

                                     Practice Time                          # of shots made

                                    1                                                          0

                                    2                                                          1

                                    1                                                          0

                                    3                                                          2

                                    3                                                          2

Test whether practice time is related to #of shots made using SPSS to conduct Person Correlation Coefficient.  Use the information from the output to complete the hypothesis test.  Be sure to turn in both your output file, and your answers to the following questions: 

Step 1: Write the null and research hypotheses in words

Step 2: Find the critical value            .  Set alpha = .05                                         

 Step 3:            Compute the appropriate test statistic (just insert the correlation you found with SPSS.  You can double check the answer with your own computation if you like)

Step 4:  Make a decision about the null.  Reject or Fail to Reject.                    

Conclusion:  Describe the relationship between practice time and #of shots made.  

When using SPSS this time you will enter the data in separate columns.  Put the X-variable in the VAR1 column and put the Y-variable in the VAR2 column.  We do it this way because we have an X and Y value for each participant in our data.

 To compute the correlation just select Analyze from the menu at the top, then select correlate.  Choose the Bivariate option.  Pearson’s correlation should be checked as the default.  You might want to save your data since we will be using these same data for Lab #4.