😰 Exam stress in first-year and final-year students
Research question: Do final-year students report more exam stress than first-year students? Answer: A Mann-Whitney U test showed that final year students reported significantly higher exam stress (Mdn = 3.5) than first year students (Mdn = 3), U = 1378.5, z = −2.34, p = .019, r = .21.
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What is the situation?
A (fictional) university counselling unit asked 120 students to rate their exam stress on a single 1–5 item (1 = very low … 5 = very high). The data are synthetic — produced by a seeded random process for teaching; they describe no real people or organisations.
What is in the dataset?
120 cases.
| Variable | Label | Measure | Value labels |
|---|---|---|---|
id | Student ID | scale | |
year_group | Year group | nominal | 1 = First year, 2 = Final year |
stress | Exam stress (1–5) | ordinal | 1 = Very low, 2 = Low, 3 = Moderate, 4 = High, 5 = Very high |
How is it analysed, step by step?
- Crosstabs — See the full distribution of answers in each group. (guide)
First year: Very low 5.0%, Low 20.0%, Moderate 43.3%, High 21.7%, Very high 10.0%
Final year: Very low 3.3%, Low 5.0%, Moderate 41.7%, High 38.3%, Very high 11.7% - Mann-Whitney U — A single Likert item is ordinal, so compare the groups on ranks. (guide)
Mean rank First year = 53.48, Final year = 67.53; U = 1378.5, z = −2.34, p = .019, r = .21.
How would I write it up (APA style)?
A Mann-Whitney U test showed that final year students reported significantly higher exam stress (Mdn = 3.5) than first year students (Mdn = 3), U = 1378.5, z = −2.34, p = .019, r = .21.
Every number on this page was computed by StatLab's statistics engine from this dataset when the page was built, and the same analyses are part of the reference validation against scipy/statsmodels (433 reference test cases, 36,554 values checked against scipy/statsmodels/numpy, 0 failures). “Open this example” loads the data and runs these steps live in your browser.