BRED, Assignment 2

Vanshpreet S Kohli, 2020114014

1. Inter-rater agreement
The Cohen’s Kappa agreement score between A and B is satisfactory (0.67), indicating that when assessing the
aggressiveness of participants, raters A and B tend to assign similar ratings to the same participants. However, A
Cohen’s Kappa score below 0.1 between raters A and C (0.031), as well as B and C (0.059) indicates that C tends to
disagree significantly with A as well as B which could indicate differing perceptions of participant aggressiveness.

2. Internal Consistency
Cronbach's Alpha is a suitable measure for internal consistency in this case because it assesses the reliability of
Likert scale questionnaire items across multiple constructs, ensuring that items within each construct consistently
measure the same underlying trait.

 Score for Fantasy: 0.77

 Score for Empathetic concern: 0.81

 Score for Perspective taking: 0.74

 Score for Personal Distress: 0.77

As shown here, all the internal consistency scores are satisfactorily high (>0.7), indicating an acceptable level of
internal consistency.

3. Questionnaire flaws
a) Hypothetical questions

 It is inadvisable, especially for a feebdack form, to place customers in scenarios (such as “If you were to buy
a product from our store, how likely would you be to recommend it to your friends”) and make inferences out
of such responses.
b) Taxing memory

 People are shown to be very likely to misremenber events and numbers, and it is thus a bad practice to ask
them how many times they visited the store (the form even explicitly asks them to guess – “If you can't
remember, please guess.”)
c) Double/triple negatives

 “Don’t you think our prices are not unreasonable” – double negatives can confuse people, and this is
worsened by the “Don’t” which adds a negation and makes it sound as though validation is being sought.
d) Loaded questions, validation seeking

 Some questions seem manipulative, such as “prices are competitive, right”, “produce section, which is the
best in town”, “excellent service and friendly staff”, where the consumer might not agree with the loaded
element in questions.
4. Sampling
a) A stratified random sampling strategy is suitable for this medical research study. It aligns with the goals of
collecting data from different age groups and regions across the country. This method ensures that each stratum
(age group and region) is represented in the sample, providing a more representative and balanced dataset. It helps
mitigate the risk of selection bias and allows for meaningful comparisons between subgroups.
b) For the manufacturing company's quality assessment of its products, a random sampling strategy would be
appropriate. This strategy aligns with the experiment's goal of ensuring the sampled items are representative of the
entire production process. It is cost-effective, and this approach helps avoid potential bias and provides a fair
representation of the overall product quality. It allows for a statistically sound assessment of quality across the
entire production process.
c) A stratified random sampling strategy is the most suitable approach for the college's satisfaction survey. This
strategy aligns with the goal of collecting feedback from students of different academic batches. By dividing the
student population into strata based on academic majors and years of study, and then randomly sampling within
each stratum, you ensure that each subgroup is represented in the survey. This approach allows for a more
comprehensive understanding of satisfaction levels across various demographics, making the results more
representative and useful for the college administration.
d) The customers can be split into clusters, either geographically or based on, say, spending habits. A number of
participants can be sampled at random from each cluster, which ought to be a good and useful representation of
all the customers without having to sample from too many customers.