Exercise 1: Importing data, graphing histograms, computing descriptives of distributions

Here are two datasets: Race 1 and Race 2. These are two different sets of running times for 5Ks. The left column is age (in years) and the right column is race time (in seconds). Download these datasets to your computer and import them into SPSS. On some computers, you can simply drag the text file onto the SPSS icon and follow the instructions to import a tab-delimited file. On others, you may want to use the File > Read Text Data... option in the top menus. Once you have the data imported, make sure you have your variables named and specified appropriately (as continuous variables). Use Analyze > Descriptive Statistics > Descriptives, and Graphs > Histogram to play with the data. Answer the following questions:

• Which race has the fastest mean?
• Which race has the highest standard deviation?
• Do the distributions (including age) appear normally distributed? If not, why not?
• Briefly discuss kurtosis and skewness of the time distributions.

Write very brief complete sentences to answer these questions. Send a Word file as an attachment (or simply a write-up in a body of an email) to psyc7302@gmail.com. Use the subject line "EXERCISE 1."

Information about the samples:

• Race 1 is from a midnight New Year's 5K.
• Race 2 is from a Thanksgiving daytime 5K.