Section 1.1 Discrimination in the Workplace: Data Exploration

 Exploration: Informal, open-ended examination of the data.  What does “open-ended” mean?  You are uncovering and summarizing patterns.  Inference: Follows strict rules and focuses on judging whether the patterns you found are what you would expect.  You use this inference to make a specific decision about your exploration.  We will use this in section 1.2

 Get familiar with the ideas of statistical thinking, without worrying about the details of calculations.  Avoid getting caught by the trap of doing and not understanding what you did or why.  Focus on the why and let the how come through practice.  Methods of stats can’t overtake the meaning.

 Cases: The subjects or objects of the study.  Variables: The characteristics of the cases that are being studied.  Variability: It is what statistics is all about.  Characteristics of cases differ. We are exploring and making inferences about the variability.  It makes our world inexact to our understanding, but non-the- less interesting.  Stats could be defined as the science of learning from data in the presence of variability  Refer to page 4 and 5 in text book.

 Distribution: What the values of the characteristic measurements are and how often each occurs.  This distribution is often shown with graphs or plots. The dot plot is the first we will discuss.  Example: # of siblings of students  Dot Plot: A number line that shows the spread of the data with dots above the numbers where the data lies. More dots mean more data points at that value.

 Refer to Westvaco spreadsheet… (p. 5 and 6)  Let’s look at “Age” of salaried retained workers (labeled “0”)  Compare that to age of salaried laid off workers (labeled “1,2,3,4,5”)  Is there a pattern or difference that you can see from a dot plot?

 2 Way Table: Shows details of data in rows and columns. Cases are in rows and characteristics are in columns.  This can be used to show similarities or differences in quantities and proportions. See page 6. Laid offRetainedTotal Under or Older12820 Total18 36

 Compare text book display 1.3 – Salaried workers to display 1.5 – Hourly workers. Which gives stronger evidence in support of a claim for age discrimination?  Why?

 If time permits:  Page 9  Practice #s: 1, 2, 3

 Page 9:  Exercises 1, 2, 3, 5, 7