Data 606 Presentation

Alice Friedman
September 4, 2019

Haters Gonna Hate, Study Confirms: A study of dispositional attitude and response to fictional consumer products

What are the cases?

  • A case is a generally represented by a row in a dataset
  • Each case in this study represents a single study participant

What are the response variables in this study?

  • Response to a fictional product, a microwave, as measured by a survey

What are the explanatory variables in this study?

  • Average dispositional attitude
  • In other words: How likely is a person to have negative attitudes to a wide range of unrelated things, as measured by a survey

Does the study employ random sampling?

  • Yes: The sample consists of 200 randomly selected men and women.

Is this an observational study or an experiment?

This is an experiment:

  • Researchers created an artificial siutation to simulate real life
  • They did not observe haters hating “in the wild”

Can we establish a causal link between the explanatory and response variables?

In other words, does being a “hater” cause “hating”?

“Researchers concluded that 'some people tend to like things, whereas others tend to dislike things, and a more thorough understanding of this tendency will lead to a more thorough understanding of the psychology of attitudes.'”

While it is never possible to rule out all confounding variables, the experiment supports the hypothesis.

Conclusion

Can the results of the study be generalized to the population at large?

If the population is “human beings,” as the paper suggests, then no.

Possible confounding variables:

  • Cultural context
  • Age of participants (e.g. adults)
  • Willingness to participate in studies