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.
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.
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.
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 # Just Study 1
d <- read_sav('data/Empathy Gap Study 1 data.sav')
names(d)## [1] "ID" "attachment1"
## [3] "attachment2" "attachment3"
## [5] "attachment4" "attachment5"
## [7] "attachment6" "attachment7"
## [9] "attachment8" "attachment9"
## [11] "attachment10" "attachment11"
## [13] "attachment12" "attachment13"
## [15] "attachment14" "attachment15"
## [17] "attachment16" "attachment17"
## [19] "attachment18" "attachment19"
## [21] "attachment20" "attachment21"
## [23] "attachment22" "attachment23"
## [25] "attachment24" "attachment25"
## [27] "attachment26" "attachment27"
## [29] "attachment28" "attachment29"
## [31] "attachment30" "attachment31"
## [33] "attachment32" "attachment33"
## [35] "attachment34" "attachment35"
## [37] "attachment36" "FOBA1"
## [39] "FOBA2" "FOBA3"
## [41] "FOBA4" "FOBA5"
## [43] "FOBA6" "empathy1"
## [45] "empathy2" "empathy3"
## [47] "empathy4" "empathy5"
## [49] "empathy6" "empathy7"
## [51] "empathy8" "empathy9"
## [53] "empathy10" "empathy11"
## [55] "empathy12" "empathy13"
## [57] "empathy14" "empathy15"
## [59] "empathy16" "empathy17"
## [61] "empathy18" "empathy19"
## [63] "empathy20" "empathy21"
## [65] "empathy22" "empathy23"
## [67] "empathy24" "empathy25"
## [69] "empathy26" "empathy27"
## [71] "empathy28" "age"
## [73] "livedincanada" "orientation"
## [75] "inrel" "longterm"
## [77] "dating" "shortterm"
## [79] "intimate" "otheropen"
## [81] "drink" "children"
## [83] "responseq1" "responseq2"
## [85] "responseq3" "responseq4"
## [87] "reasontrue1" "motives1"
## [89] "reasontrue2" "motives2"
## [91] "reasontrue3" "motives3"
## [93] "reasontrue4" "motives4"
## [95] "reasontrue5" "motives5"
## [97] "reasontrue6" "motives6"
## [99] "reasontrue7" "motives7"
## [101] "reasontrue8" "motives8"
## [103] "suspicious" "selfattractive"
## [105] "otherattractive" "EmpathyPTtot"
## [107] "EmpathyFStot" "EmpathyECtot"
## [109] "EmpathyPDtot" "fobstot"
## [111] "attachmentavoidance" "attachmentanxiety"
## [113] "stateguilttot" "stateempathytot"
## [115] "excitementtot" "compatibilitytot"
## [117] "very_otherfocused" "less_otherfocused"
## [119] "gender" "genderXcondition"
## [121] "REQUIRED_VARIABLES_START_BELOW" "condition"
## [123] "exchangeinfo" "otherfocused_motives"
## [125] "selffocused_motives"d_exchangeinfo = d %>%
select(c("ID", "condition", "exchangeinfo"))
view(d_exchangeinfo)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%).
exchangeinfo_descriptive = d_exchangeinfo %>%
group_by(condition) %>%
summarize(Total = length(exchangeinfo),
Did_Not_Exchange = length(which(exchangeinfo == 2)),
Did_Exchange = length(which(exchangeinfo == 1)),
Percentage_Exchanged = (Did_Exchange/Total)*100)
exchangeinfo_descriptive## # A tibble: 2 x 5
## condition Total Did_Not_Exchange Did_Exchange Percentage_Exchanged
## <dbl+lbl> <int> <int> <int> <dbl>
## 1 0 [hypothetical] 61 51 10 16.4
## 2 1 [real] 71 45 26 36.6A 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.
table_of_exchanges = table(d_exchangeinfo$condition, d_exchangeinfo$exchangeinfo)
chisq.test(table_of_exchanges, correct = F)##
## Pearson's Chi-squared test
##
## data: table_of_exchanges
## X-squared = 6.7674, df = 1, p-value = 0.009284Were 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 from this study.
How difficult was it to reproduce your results?
It was not extremely difficult to reproduce these results, although I had a fwe hiccups related to making sure that I was using the right code. I had to Google a few things, but overall this felt doable.
What aspects made it difficult? What aspects made it easy?
The aspects that made this difficult were that the variables were not clearly labeled. For instance, it was not clear that a condition with value “0” meant that a person was in the hypothetical group and condition “1” was the in-person group. I was only able to determine this by comparing the values reported by the authors. Similarly, it was not clearly that a “1” under the variable “exchangeinfo” meant that a person decided to exchange their information and a “2” meant that a person decided not to exchange information. Finally, what made this challenging was that the authors did not state that they did not use the Yates continuity correction. I was getting a different X-squared and p value for the Chi squared test until I realized I needed to disable this correction. What made this reproduction easy was that the variable names were easy to identify.