How to Organize Psychological Test Data

The book "Psychological Testing: Principles, Applications, and Issues" defines psychological testing as a means of examining various aspects of human behavior. For the practitioner or researcher who performs psychological testing, the work is only beginning when the subjects have completed the tests and all the data is in place. The next step for the researcher is to organize the data into a form that will conform to the standards of the discipline and offer the best possible presentation of the findings. One potential way to achieve this end is by organizing the data by class intervals, frequency or ranking.

Instructions

• 1

  Organize the data by class interval, in which the data are divided into groups, or classes. To determine the class interval, use one of the following equations:

  If you know the number of classes required, subtract the lowest value from the highest, and divide the result by the number of classes.

  If you don't know the number of classes required, subtract the lowest value from the highest, and divide the result by 1 + 3.22 (Log) N

• 2

  Organize your data by frequency, or "f," which refers to the number of times a particular score appears within a given distribution. To identify frequency, list all scores in ascending order in the first column of a three-column table. Name the first column "Test Score" or whatever name describes it best. In the next column, headed "Count," use hash marks to represent the number of times each score occurred. In the third column, headed "f," record the Arabic numeral for the number of occurrences of each score.

• 3

  Organize the data by ranking. To organize data by ranking, list the scores in descending order; i.e., start with the highest and proceed to the lowest. Assign the highest score the number 1, the second highest score the number 2, and so on.