Investigating a Claim of Discrimination

Section 1.1 Discrimination in the Workplace: Data Exploration

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Exploration: Informal, open-ended examination of the data.  What does “open-ended” mean?  You are uncovering and summarizing patterns.

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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

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Get familiar with the ideas of statistical thinking, without worrying about the details of calculations.

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Avoid getting caught by the trap of doing and not understanding what you did or why.

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Focus on the why and let the how come through practice.

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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. 

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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.

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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

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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.

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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?

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2 Way Table: Shows details of data in rows and columns. Cases are in rows and characteristics are in columns.

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This can be used to show similarities or differences in quantities and proportions. See page 6. Laid off

Retained

Total

Under 50

6

10

16

50 or Older

12

8

20

Total

18

18

36

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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?

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If time permits:

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Page 9 Practice #s: 1, 2, 3

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Page 9: Exercises 1, 2, 3, 5, 7