Exercises 223Discussion Questions
7.51 In Chapter 6 (Exercise 6.38) we examined data presented by Hout et al. on the sexual satis-
faction of married couples. We did that by setting up a contingency table and computing
on that table. We looked at those data again in a different way in Exercise 7.19, where we ran
a ttest comparing the means. Instead of asking subjects to rate their statement “Sex is fun for
me and my partner” as “Never, Fairly Often, Very Often, or Almost Always,” we converted
their categorical responses to a four-point scale from 1 5 “Never” to 4 5 “Almost Always.”
a. How does the “scale of measurement” issue relate to this analysis?
b. Even setting aside the fact that this exercise and Exercise 6.37 use different statistical
tests, the two exercises are asking quite different questions of the data. What are those
different questions?
c. What might you do if 15 wives refused to answer the question, although their husbands
did, and 8 husbands refused to answer the question when their wives did?
d. How comfortable are you with the ttest analysis, and what might you do instead?
7.52 Write a short paragraph containing the information necessary to describe the results of the
experiment discussed in Exercise 7.31. This should be an abbreviated version of what you
would write in a research article.x^2