Jason is interested in studying the effect of gender and social media usage on loneliness in college students. He obtained data from 30 men (10 men who had high social media usage and 10 men who had moderate social media usage and 10 who did not use social media much) and 30 women volunteers (10 women scored high on social media usage, 10 women moderately used the social media, and 10 scored low on social media usage) in their freshman year. Jason administered the Revised UCLA 20 item loneliness scale to measure subjective feelings of loneliness and social isolation to these 60 participants. A high score on the scale indicates higher feelings of loneliness. Participants rate each item on a scale from 1 (Never) to 4 (Often). There are two independent variables in the study (social media usage and gender) and one dependent variable, which is loneliness. The design for the study can be described as 3*2 ANOVA, number of levels of social media usage (low, moderate, high social media use) and number of levels of gender (males vs females).
1. Before opening the data, what would you hypothesize about this research study?
2. Conduct descriptive analyses (mean, Standard deviation) and report them here. What would you interpret based on the Mean values?
3. Conduct a Two-Way ANOVA. Report your statistical findings (including any applicable tables or figures in APA format).
a. Are there any significant main effects?
b. Is the interaction effect significant?
4. What would you conclude from this analysis? Is your hypothesis supported?
5. What would be your next steps, if this were your research project? What follow up tests will you conduct? What would the follow up tests indicate?