For this exercise, please try to reproduce the results from Study 1 of the associated paper (Joel, Teper, & MacDonald, 2014). The PDF of the paper is included in the same folder as this Rmd file.

Methods summary:

In study 1, 150 introductory psychology students were randomly assigned to a “real” or a “hypothetical” condition. In the real condition, participants believed that they would have a real opportuniy to connect with potential romantic partners. In the hypothetical condition, participants simply imagined that they are on a date. All participants were required to select their favorite profile and answer whether they were willing to exchange contact information.


Target outcomes:

Below is the specific result you will attempt to reproduce (quoted directly from the results section of Study 1):

We next tested our primary hypothesis that participants would be more reluctant to reject the unattractive date when they believed the situation to be real rather than hypothetical. Only 10 of the 61 participants in the hypothetical condition chose to exchange contact information with the unattractive potential date (16%). In contrast, 26 of the 71 participants in the real condition chose to exchange contact information (37%). A chi-square test of independence indicated that participants were significantly less likely to reject the unattractive potential date in the real condition compared with the hypothetical condition, X^2(1, N = 132) = 6.77, p = .009.


Step 1: Load packages

library(tidyverse) # for data munging
library(knitr) # for kable table formating
library(haven) # import and export 'SPSS', 'Stata' and 'SAS' Files
library(readxl) # import excel files

# #optional packages:
# library(broom)
# library(labelled)# converts SPSS's labelled to R's factor 

Step 2: Load data

# Just Study 1
d <- read_sav('data/Empathy Gap Study 1 data.sav')

Step 3: Tidy data

# making the condition a factor and making exchange numeric based on if htye exchanged info
df <- d %>%
  mutate(
    condition = as_factor(condition, levels = "labels"), # making condition a label
    exchange_f = as_factor(exchangeinfo, levels = "labels"), # adding factor for exchangeinfo using labels
    exchange = case_when( # recode yes/no to 1/0
      exchange_f == "yes" ~ 1,
      exchange_f == "no"  ~ 0,
      TRUE ~ NA_real_
    )
  )

Step 4: Run analysis

Descriptive statistics

Only 10 of the 61 participants in the hypothetical condition chose to exchange contact information with the unattractive potential date (16%). In contrast, 26 of the 71 participants in the real condition chose to exchange contact information (37%).

# reproduce the above results here
df %>%
  group_by(condition) %>% # grouping by hyp or real 
  summarise(
    n = n(),
    exchanged = sum(exchange == 1, na.rm = TRUE), # counting if exchanged 
    percent = round(exchanged / n * 100, 1) # making percentage
  )
## # A tibble: 2 × 4
##   condition        n exchanged percent
##   <fct>        <int>     <int>   <dbl>
## 1 hypothetical    61        10    16.4
## 2 real            71        26    36.6

Inferential statistics

A chi-square test of independence indicated that participants were significantly less likely to reject the unattractive potential date in the real condition compared with the hypothetical condition, X^2(1, N = 132) = 6.77, p = .009.

Hint: if you are using the function chisq.test(), make sure to set the continuity correction to false (“correct = FALSE”) since sample size is greater than 20.

# making the table that the chisq test will need with condition and whether or not they exchanged 
tableForChi <- table(df$condition, df$exchange)
chisq.test(tableForChi, correct = FALSE)
## 
##  Pearson's Chi-squared test
## 
## data:  tableForChi
## X-squared = 6.7674, df = 1, p-value = 0.009284

Step 5: Reflection

Were you able to reproduce the results you attempted to reproduce? If not, what part(s) were you unable to reproduce?

Yes, I was able to reproduce the results of study 1! Both the descriptives and the chi squared test.

How difficult was it to reproduce your results?

I think getting the data where it needed to get was the most difficult aspect.

What aspects made it difficult? What aspects made it easy?

Once I got things wrangled the way they were supposed to be, printing the descriptives and the chi squared test weren’t difficult. Figuring out how to wrangle SPSS data was a little tricky. The df was also pretty large, so it took me a moment to orient to.