Please help with discussion
Please respond thoughtfully to at least two classmates, it do not have to be long response.
Response 1
Christopher Judge posted Mar 22, 2024 7:01 PM
Hello everybody,
“Statistics is often assumed to spread like some musty odor, covering everything statistical with a layer of suffocating tedium.” (Ableson, 2012). I do not think I have laugh at and related to a single line of an article so much. My study is looking into the relationship between Social Media use and the prosocial behaviors of the users and I feel it will end up being more interesting than important. With Social Media very quickly moving from that thing college students are using (Facebook, yes I am old enough to remember Facebook when it required a college email to register) to being a part of almost everything we do and if not directly connected, some aspect of social media is added to the mix. Finding out what areas of our lives it effects and does not effect can be very useful (In my situation it could help charitable organizations find better more efficient ways to gather participants and donors). But I do not feel that there will be some world altering revelation when the data is analyzed. But I do think that it will be potentially surprising as Ableson put in the article, “surprisingness” comes from presenting new information that has not been thought of (2012). I think the most surprising thing I am hoping for is to find that intense social media use results in a higher level of prosocial behaviors. This being surprising due to how Social Media tends to be the new “video games” when people are looking for the reason for negative behaviors (usually with a lone fist shaking in the air).
Ableson made it clear that he was not trying to create an interesting formula because, as stated before, interest is wildly subjective and varies from one person and situation to another. What I find interesting is based on my own personal and professional interests and the same should be assumed about everyone else. To create a “formula” for what is nor is not interesting would only be effective in only specific situations. I will end my submission with what I think is my favorite line in the whole article was the question diagnose how important the resulting data is, “What can I learn from this about other things that are also important?” (Ableson, 2012).
References
Abelson, R. P. (2012). Statistics as principled argument. In Psychology Press eBooks. Taylor & Francis Group an Informa business.
Response 2
Madison Simons posted Mar 21, 2024 2:56 PM
My topic is communication and relationship satisfaction, which may sound boring to some because it’s broad and overarching. Versus it being something like, what specific variables lead to a successful marriage or what are the effects of conflict and negative communication on relationship satisfaction both which catch the readers attention. The title of my review paper is, Exploring the impact of communication on relationship satisfaction: a comprehensive review. My goal was to create a paper that is both interesting and important because my aim is to help provide information that can lead to overall awareness. Relationships are a fundamental part of human existence making studying them an important endeavor. Researchers have extensively studied what makes relationships healthy, successful, unsuccessful, unhealthy, just to name a few. It is important to be aware of what constitutes relationship satisfaction to prevent compounding issues, miscommunication, divorce, ect. Relationship satisfaction is also a key element to subjective well-being and overall health which most people would agree are very important parts of life. For my review communication is classified as the behaviors couples engage in when speaking to one another whether it is problem-solving, conflict, or expressing feelings and opinions. Additionally, I defined relationship satisfaction as the positive, negative, or neutral perceptions of each individual concerning their relationship. Abelson (1995) argues that statistics can be interesting and in my case the statistics do show interesting trends. Divorce statistics are something Abelson (1995) would call scientifically interesting and surprising. The data shows that a whopping 50% of all marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation (Baschick, 2012). Researchers also estimate that 41% percent of all first marriages end in divorce (Banschick, 2012). Additional marriages have even higher rates of divorce, second marriages end 67% of the time and third marriages 73% (Banschick, 2012). All of these statistics are just shockingly high and merit further research. Abelson (1995) states that research needs to be surprising so that it can play a role in initiating change, and I certainly think that these divorce statistics display that. In addition, Abelson (1995) argues that importance is associated with the selected variable’s connection to other issues and the dominating importance the variable has. Abelson’s (1995) example was cancer research which exceeds importance over many other topics. I would argue in congruence with this that communication and relationship satisfaction is important because it can be associated with conflict, conflict mediation, coping, problem solving, relationship quality, commitment, and other important topics that can influence people’s relationships greatly. Thus making communication and relationship satisfaction important from my perspective. Lastly, when Abelson (1995) quantifies surprisingness with a formula he captures the relationship between the magnitudes of expected and observed effects. It is the relative effect size that equates to the level of surprisingness he explains (Abelson, 1995).
References
Abelson, R. P. (1995). Statistics as principled argument. L. Erlbaum Associates, New York, Ny.
Banschick, M. (2012, February 6). The High Failure Rate of Second and Third Marriages | Psychology Today. Www.psychologytoday.com.
