Past exam of the digital social research: statistics core course of the University of Oxford / 2020 / 4 / Solution

Compare row percentages because employment groups have different sizes. Never-use is reported by $219/599=36.56\%$ of the non-employed group and $240/825=29.09\%$ of the employed group. Daily use is $24.21\%$ versus $31.39\%$; more-than-daily use is $9.02\%$ versus $13.09\%$. Combining the last two categories gives $33.22\%$ versus $44.48\%$, an employed-minus-non-employed difference of about 11.26 percentage points. That threshold comparison is a descriptive summary of the six-category table, not a replacement for the original omnibus test or a newly declared prespecified endpoint. It does not assign equal spacing to the six frequency categories.

Here the row counts, column counts and grand total are additive. Under the null hypothesis of employment–use independence, a $2\times 6$ contingency table has $(2-1)(6-1)=5$ statistical degrees of freedom. The Pearson chi-squared statistic recomputed from the cells is $21.132241$, agreeing with the printed value, and its p-value is about $0.0007648$. The likelihood-ratio test statistic $G^2\approx 21.25379$ gives $p\approx 0.000725$. Both reject independence at the conventional 5% and 1% significance levels under the sampling assumptions. The minimum expected frequency, about $20.61$, gives no sparse-cell warning for this table. The tests compare whole category distributions; they do not by themselves identify one category as the source of the association or establish its causal direction.

Cramér's V is $\sqrt{21.132241/1424}\approx 0.12182$. The generalized phi coefficient coincides with it for this two-row table, while the contingency coefficient is about $0.121$. These are modest magnitudes; a small p-value does not make the relationship large or useful for individual prediction. The employment–use association could change after conditioning on age or other covariates, and the sample excludes $629$ cases without recorded use. Relative to the employment margins in Figure 1, the omitted complete-case counts are $238$ non-employed and $391$ employed, or about $28.43\%$ and $32.15\%$ of those groups. Different missing fractions alone do not identify the missing-data mechanism, but they rule out treating complete records as automatically representative of everyone.

The count-based Goodman and Kruskal's gamma isWith the employment categories ordered non-employed then employed and use ordered from never to more than daily, this positive value means concordant pairs outnumber discordant pairs among pairs untied on both variables. It is not a 16.9% increase in a person's use and is not a causal effect. Reversing one ordering reverses its sign. Excluding ties can make gamma appreciably larger than tie-adjusted measures.

For use as response and employment as predictor, the cells give Somers' D about $0.12976$, Kendall's tau-b about $0.10362$ and Stuart's tau-c about $0.12650$. The printed Somers value $0.141$ and tau-b $0.108$ should not be presented as verified calculations: the table prints $77297$ second-variable-only ties, whereas its cells give $115073$. The other four pair classes agree with the cells; the printed five classes sum to $975400$, not $\left(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{1424}{2}\right)=1013176$. The source does not establish an alternative tie convention that repairs those ordinary identities. The direction remains a weak positive association under either description, but the exact measures require coherent pair counts.

Modal prediction provides another perspective. Without employment information, predicting the globally most frequent use category, never, makes $1424-459=965$ errors. Predicting a separate modal use category in each employment group makes $1424-(219+259)=946$ errors. Thus Goodman and Kruskal's lambda for use given employment is $(965-946)/965\approx 0.01969$: about a 1.97% reduction in modal-classification errors. For employment given use the corresponding reduction is $3/599\approx 0.00501$. These identify the targets explicitly; the source's row-dependent/column-dependent labels should not be used to reverse the target interpretation. The two small numbers show why an independence test can be significant while coarse modal prediction improves very little. The supported overall finding is a modest positive association among observed respondents, requiring conditional analysis and a missing-data qualification before broader claims.