Post 1: (Write a 50-100 words response)

Respond in one or more of the following ways:

• Ask a probing question.
• Share an insight from having read your colleague’s posting.
• Offer and support an opinion.
• Validate an idea with your own experience.
• Make a suggestion.
• Expand on your colleague’s posting.

Evaluation and Application of Attitude Instruments

The attitude instrument I selected for this discussion is called the Attitudes Toward Transgender Patients (ATTP) instrument. This instrument was created by Ensign, Dodge, Herbenick, and Docherty (2018) to assess the attitudes of athletic trainers towards their transgender patients. Ensign, Dodge, Herbenick, and Docherty (2018) created this instrument by organizing sets of survey and questionnaire questions and administering them via email to 3000 athletic trainers. Of the 3000 surveys/questionnaires sent out, 507 athletic trainers responded. Because only 507 out of 3000 (17%) people responded to the survey/questionnaire, this left room for error in the reliability and validity of this instrument. During the article the authors explained that surveys and questionnaires, such as the ones used in this instrument, face the chance that participants may respond to the survey by answering the way they hope to treat transgender patients, without really knowing how they would react if they were in the given situation. On the other hand, this instrument has strengths in that it allows participants the chance to think about and assess their own implicit and explicit attitudes towards transgenders and this alone may influence positive attitude change.

My main area of interest in the social psychology field is better understanding bullying and prevention of bullying. I feel that this instrument can be used to ensure that athletic trainers are professionally and appropriately treating their patients regardless of their sexual orientation and this alone can help create a safe, bully free, environment for transgender patients during their treatment. I also feel that, although this instrument is intended for athletic trainers, it could be recreated to focus on a more general population and also include attitudes on the LGBT community to raise awareness of negative attitudes towards the LGBT community and help promote a bully free environment for these individuals as well.

Ensign, K. A., Dodge, B. M., Herbenick, D., & Docherty, C. L. (2018). Development of an instrument to assess athletic trainers’ attitudes toward transgender patients. Journal Of Athletic Training (Allen Press), 53(4), 431-436. doi:10.4085/1062-6050-496-16

Post 2: (Write a 50-100 words response)

Respond the following ways: “respond to at least one colleague’s post and comment on how we as social change agents and critical consumers of research can balance the usefulness with the error in the research. Do we throw the research out because of too much error, or is there something useful that it can tell us?”

Central Tendency and Variability

Continuous Variable

Family Income in Constant Dollars

The continuous variable that I am using is Family Income in Constant Dollars. The data shows and according to the Empirical Rule, 68% of the values or the majority of the population falls below $50,000. The standard deviation is 43340.88. The mean of 48603.29 is higher than the median of 33255.00 which indicates the distribution is positively skewed. This means that the mean is positioned to the right of the median (Frankfort-Nachmias & Leon-Guerrero, 2018). This is evident in a visual graph. According to the Level of Measurement chart, mode or median would be a better level of measurement as it is interval-ratio measure which has skewed distribution (Frankfort-Nachmias & Leon-Guerrero, 2018). Mode or median are not influenced by extreme scores. Income (personal) is typically positively skewed due to the small number of people with higher incomes thus the mean misrepresents the average income in families. The information shown with the majority of the family income below $50,000.00 would raise interest for social support programs to lower incomes.

Categorical

Marital Status

For the categorical variable I chose is Marital Status. Mode is the appropriate measure of frequency distribution for this categorical variable. Mode is always a category or score and the only measure that can be used with nominal variables (Frankfort-Nachmias & Leon-Guerrero, 2018). The married category would be the mode of this distribution since it is the category with the largest number. There is a greater variability when there is more evenly distributed data but this variable is not evenly distributed therefore has less variability. The Marital Status variable has the measure as follows: Married category having the highest frequency at 1158 and the Separated category, the lowest category at 81 with n=2534.

The variability of this Marital Status data is demonstrated by the standard deviation of 1.680 which would indicate less variability around the mean of 2.57. The further the number from zero the more widely dispersed the population.

The Never Married category was the second highest category. This could answer the possibility of divorce rates decreasing and more adults are choosing to not marry. By combining with another variable such as income, the social change could be a look into the relationship of income and marital status.

Frankfort-Nachmias, C., & Leon-Guerrero, A. (2018). Social Statistics for a Diverse Society. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.