What is a T-Test? Types, Assumptions, and Calculations Explained Let’s be honest for a moment. For many of us in the mental health field, the word “statistics” triggers a mild fight-or-flight response. We entered this profession to understand the human mind, to help people navigate trauma, and to foster growth, not necessarily to crunch numbers.
Understanding Measurement Reliability and Validity A concerned parent takes their child to a psychologist to be assessed for ADHD. The clinician runs a battery of tests and concludes the child has the disorder. Seeking a second opinion, the parent visits a different psychologist a week later. Using the same tools, this new clinician concludes the
Process Capability: Measuring Mental Consistency & Potential Imagine a bakery. The air smells of vanilla and warm sugar. The baker’s goal is simple: produce thousands of muffins that are exactly the same size, shape, and weight. But humans aren’t muffins. And our minds aren’t factories. In my years working with clients, one of the most
Finding the “Best Fit”: An Intuitive Guide to Maximum Likelihood Estimation The Fear of the Unknown (and Statistics) If there is one thing that unites psychology students and mental health professionals across the globe, it is often a shared, quiet anxiety regarding one specific subject: Statistics. We entered this field to understand the human mind,
What Are Latent Variables? Measuring the Unmeasurable As a psychologist, I often sit with clients and discuss profound concepts: anxiety, intelligence, extraversion, or resilience. We know these things exist. We feel them. We see their impact on our lives every single day. But if you asked me to put “resilience” in a jar or weigh
Cohen’s Kappa Explained: Measuring Reliability in Psychology Research Imagine a patient named Sarah. She visits Dr. A because she’s been feeling persistently low, tired, and unmotivated. Dr. A conducts an assessment and diagnoses her with Major Depressive Disorder. Seeking a second opinion, Sarah visits Dr. B the following week. Dr. B asks similar questions but
Is Your Research Reliable? Understanding Fleiss’ Kappa Imagine you are the lead clinical psychologist at a busy diagnostic center. A new patient walks in displaying complex symptoms. You ask three different clinicians to assess this patient independently to determine if they meet the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder. Doctor A says “Yes.” Doctor B says
How to Create Dummy Variables in SPSS? By Ruben Geert van den Berg under Regression You can’t readily use categorical variables as predictors in linear regression: you need to break them up into dichotomous variables known as dummy variables.The ideal way to create these is our dummy variables tool. If you don’t want to use
Clustered Bar Chart over Multiple Variables By Ruben Geert van den Berg under Charts in SPSS Example Data VARSTOCASES without VARSTOCASES Restructuring the Data SPSS Chart Builder – Basic Steps Final Result This tutorial shows how to create the clustered bar chart shown below in SPSS. As this requires restructuring our data, we’ll first do
SPSS Chi-Square Test with Pairwise Z-Tests By Ruben Geert van den Berg under Chi-Square Tests Most data analysts are familiar with post hoc tests for ANOVA. Oddly, post hoc tests for the chi-square independence test are not widely used. This tutorial walks you through 2 options for obtaining and interpreting them in SPSS. Option 1