Scenario
You are a research scientist with expertise in a range of backgrounds related to psychology and you have a strong understanding of research methods and statistics. You received a request to investigate:
1) Whether or not being able to save at the end of the week affects the financial stress of tertiary students in New Zealand
2) If a student thinks their weekly income is enough, would they show decreased financial stress?
3) Does subjective social status affect a tertiary student’s perception of financial stress?
To answer these questions, you collected data from n = 150 University of Canterbury students (Lab Report dataset on Learn) on Students Financial Stress Scale – Aotearoa (SFSS-A), Debt Attitude Scale (DAS), Subjective Social Status (SSS) scale; and various financial and demographic variables (explained in the codebook “Lab Report codebook” on Learn).
You are intending to report your findings in APA-style in case these results can be publishable in academic outlets.
To conduct the analyses, you initially want to examine the descriptives on available data, followed by testing various variables in relation to other variables.
Introduction
Start by explaining your sample, the questions you want to answer, and the variables; and state how variables were measured.
Use appropriate statistical methods to address the following questions
1. Guided by the codebook, calculate composite variables for multi-item scales. Report this process in your write up.
2. Conduct descriptive analysis for all relevant variables and report descriptive statistics accordingly (report M, SD and frequencies where appropriate). Within descriptives, add:
a) A scatterplot of the relationship between SFSS-A and SSS
b) A histogram of SFSS-A scores.
3. Consider the following questions, justify your responses by reporting the appropriate statistical analyses (with corresponding tests of statistical significance) in APA-style. Ensure to check assumptions of parametric tests, and to use non-parametric tests where applicable:
2 a) Do students who think their weekly income is enough report higher financial stress than those who do not?
b) Do students who can save at the end of the week report higher financial stress than those who cannot?
c) Is subjective social status rating different across different levels of employment?
d) Is there a difference between the financial stress rating based on the levels of employment?
Discussion
Write a brief discussion on what your analyses show (focusing mainly on Point 3 in the Results section). In addition, identify any methodological limitations, and suggest strategies to address identified limitations