The Example of the Domestic Violence Diversion Program Director Who

question 44

Multiple Choice

The example of the domestic violence diversion program director who told the author that the program had "a 100% success rate" because no offender ever returned to the program demonstrates that

• A) most well-meaning organizations and programs do not require sociological analysis to determine if they are achieving their goals.
• B) people do not generally understand how statistics operate.
• C) most people have not been trained in how to conduct and evaluate social science research to best answer questions such as how successful a given program may be.
• D) it is extremely difficult to confront macro-level scale social problems when people have unrealistic perspectives.

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Definitions:

Standard Deviation

A means to assess the degree of variability or scattering in a set of numerical values.

Z-score

An indicator that quantifies the position of a value relative to the average in a collection of values, by indicating how many standard deviations it is from the mean.

Raw Scores

The original, untransformed scores or data collected from observations or experiments.

Hypothesized Mean

The mean value of a population parameter that is proposed in the null hypothesis, serving as a basis for testing statistical significance against observed data.