Whether in a scholarly or practitioner setting, good research and data analysis should have the benefit of peer feedback. For this Discussion, you will post your response to the hypothesis test, along

For this test, I will choose respondents that self-identified as white, which is denoted as 1, and respondents to self -identified as black or African American, denoted as 2. I'll need to remember those for the next procedure. To per\ form this procedure, Analyze, Compare Means, independent sample t-test. My test variable is my dependent variable for the variable of which a mean is ca\ lculated on. Therefore, it is that metric level variable, or any other variable w\ here it makes sense to calculate a mean. In this case, it's the socioeconomic status index of the respondent.

Click on that. Move it over to the test variable. The grouping variable \ is my categorical variable. And in this case, it is the respondent's race. I m\ ove respondents race over to the grouping variable. Right away, behi nd the variable name, you will see a set of parentheses with two question marks. This is\ SPSS's prompt to tell me what races I should enter. SPSS knows that it can only\ calculate two means and therefore is asking me to define groups. So I mu\ st click on the define groups, group 1 and group 2. For group 1, I'm going to enter the \ value number of 1, which were those respondents that self-identified as white.

For group 2, I'm going to enter 2, which for those respondents that self\ -identified as black or African American. Click Continue, and once I click OK, I wil\ l receive the output for my independent sample t-test.

The first piece of output I'm provided are the group statistics. I could\ look at the N and get an idea of the sample that ended up in the test. Ther e are 1,094 white respondents and 191 black or African American respondents. I can see fro\ m the descriptive statistics that the mean socioeconomic status index score fo\ r whites is 50.99, and for black or African Americans it's 44.96. I'm also provid\ ed with standard deviations for each mean, as well as the standard error of the \ mean.

Before I interpret the independent sample t-test, I must first examine the Levene's test for equality of variances. An assumption of the independen\ t samples t-test is that variances are equal across the two groups. SPSS, \ by default, provides you with this test to test for equality of variances. \ There's an F ©201 6 Laureate Education, Inc. 1 The t Test for Independent Samples statistic, an associated p value with it. The Levene's test tests the nu\ ll hypothesis that variances are equal. As you can see, the p value is 0.059, which is slightly above the conventional 0.050 threshold. In this case, you have to make a\ decision whether you reject or retain this null. If you set your level o\ f significance at 0.050, and since 0.0059 is slightly above that, you would fail to reject the null, and assume equal variances.

Another option you might have is since this is so close to being statist\ ically significant, you could also assume unequal variances, especially since y\ ou have an imbalance in the sample size above. For this specific test, I'm going to choose to interpret equal variances not assumed. As such, I interpret the botto\ m row.

Here, I have a t statistic of 4.216, an associated p value of 0.000, whi\ ch means the results are statistically significant at the 0.001 level. The mean difference between white and black or African Americans, on average, is 6.02, with \ a 95% confidence interval of the difference being between 3.21 and 8.84. There\ fore, I can safely reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there is a significant difference in socioeconomic status between those who identify as white a\ nd those who identify as black or African American. ©2016 Laureate Education, Inc. 2