Interpreting scattergrams
Jane has her own ice cream business and she keeps various records. To her
surprise, she found an interesting correlation between her ice cream sales and
aggressive crimes. She has started to worry that she may be irresponsible in selling
ice cream because it appears to cause people to behave more aggressively. The
table below shows her data.
Month
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Ice cream sales (data
rounded to 1000s)
10
8
7
21
32
56
130
141
84
32
11
6
Aggressive crimes (data
rounded to 1000s)
21
32
29
35
44
55
111
123
99
36
22
25
1. Sketch a scattergram of Jane’s data. Make sure to label the axes and have a
title for the scattergram.
2. What can you conclude from the data and the scattergram? Conclusions are
an interpretation of the findings.
3. Write an operationalised hypothesis for Jane’s study. Justify your choice of a
directional or non-directional hypothesis.
4. Challenge: Explain why it would be inappropriate to conclude that ice cream
sales cause aggressive crime.
5. Further challenge: Design a study to show Jane that ice cream does (or
does not) cause aggressive behaviour. You need to operationalise your
variables, decide on a suitable research method and experimental design as
well as your sampling technique. You should also suggest how you would
control extraneous variables and make your research ethical.