Taste Test Class Results
The table below summarises the results for the class that you need for your lab report. It summarises HITS by cup. You should calculate the percentage of HITS by adding both cups of the same strength, multiplying by 100 and dividing by twice the number of tasters (they each had 2 cups at that strength).
You can calculate MISSES if you wish but you do not have to.
There were only 11 participants who tasted stevia (as opposed to sugar), so we will NOT look at the difference based on sweetener type.
Remember that the final paragraph of your introduction states the aims of the research and should include two hypotheses based on your reading of the literature. Firstly, what do you predict the absolute threshold will be for all participants and, secondly, what do you predict will be the difference, if any, between male and female participants?
Method Section
Remember to fully describe all participants (407) - and not your two - in the method section. Give the ages separately for females and males. There were two participants under the age of 16. Their responses were removed from the data set.
Remember to comment on how the participants were selected. If this is not a random sample, then that is another thing to comment on in the discussion IF you think it has influenced the results. It is interesting to note that this is a good example of the point that if you have a large enough sample, individual differences tend to average out – so the average ages of males and females are very similar.
Results
Sweetener strength HITS
N Age Range Mean Age Full Half Quarter Eighth
Cup 1 Cup 2 Total Cup 1 Cup 2 Total Cup 1 Cup 2 Total Cup 1 Cup 2 Total
Total sample 407 16-84 35.73 295 292 587 152 174 326 77 76 153 48 47 95
Gender
Female 202 16-78 35.89 151 152 303 78 89 167 42 39 81 23 29 52
Male 205 16-84 35.57 144 140 284 74 85 159 35 37 72 25 18 43
Table 1. descriptive stats for 175102 class taste test experiment
Writing the Results Section
One of the important things you need to be estimating for the results is the absolute threshold, the point at which a stimulus is detected 50% of the time (this should be one of your hypotheses, based on the literature). As part of this section, as outlined in the course materials, you are required to do a bar graph of the percentage HITS of all participants. You are also required to do a table comparing the results for men and women. Remember to include a paragraph explaining each table and graph. The table above is deliberately not in APA format – so don’t just copy it! Not all the data here are going to be useful for your report.
When describing your results, do not use the word ‘significant’ or ‘significantly’ as these have a particular statistical meaning when inferential statistics have been calculated, and we have not asked you to do that. If you carry on in psychology you will be taught this in the paper 175.203.