Chapter 1. Tutorial 1.1: Identifying individuals and variable types

Problem Statement

[1-99] // 30
[140-230] // 207
[0-.1,3] // 0.002
[-99 - -1] // -2
{Male, Female} // Male or Female
{Illness, Injury, Other} // Illness, Injury, or Other

For every patient admitted to the emergency room, a hospital collects certain information, including age, sex, and whether admitted for illness, injury, or other. The hospital compiles all of this information into a monthly data set for analysis.

Describe the details of such a data set. Be careful with typing/spelling for word answers.

Step 1

questions

Question 1

The individuals in this data set are .

1
The hospital collects data on patients. Did you make a typo or forget to make this a plural (we wanted a description of individuals, not an individual)?
Individuals are those from whom data are collected in any study. They can be people, things (such as car models – if, for example, we are studying gas mileage), or much larger items – such as an entire farm field, if we were studying crop yields.

Step 2

questions

Question 3

Values for the variable age would most likely be measured in .

1
Good! Age is typically recorded in years.
Did you make a typo? When someone asks you how old you are, your response is typically given in years (and not a singular year).

Step 3

questions

Question 6

Sex is a variable with possible values and .

1
Very good. Sex [JBM1] is categorical because its possible values are male and female (and arithmetic makes no sense for those values). [JBM1]Have them change Gender to Sex in the question, as Sex is the correct variable (gender is far more complicated, and they mean sex).
Did you make a typo? Sex is categorical because its possible values are male and female (and arithmetic makes no sense for those values).