Chris Wilson's "The Ultimate Harry Potter Quiz: Find Out Which House You Truly Belong In"

Full disclosure: I have no chill when it comes to Harry Potter.

Despite my great bias, I still think this pscyometrically-created (with help from psychologists and Time Magazine's Chris Wilson!) Hogwart's House Sorter is a great example for scale building, validity, descriptive statistics, electronic consent, etc. for stats and research methods.

How to use in a Research Methods class:

1) The article details how the test drew upon the Big Five inventory. And it talks smack about the Myers-Briggs.


2) The article also uses simple language to give a rough sketch of how they used statistics to pair you with your house. The "standard statistical model" is a regression line, the "affinity for each House is measured independently", etc.



While you are taking the quiz itself, there are some RM/statsy lessons:

3) At the end of the quiz, you are asked to contribute some more information. It is a great example of a leading response options as well as implied, electronic consent.


4) The quiz provides descriptive statistics of how well you fit into each House:


5) There is a debriefing:


This isn't the first time I've posted about Chris Wilson's statsy interactive pieces for Time magazine.

Teach Least Squared Error, trends over time, archival data sets via this feature that finds the British equivalent of your first name based on the popularity of your name when you were born versus the same ranked name in England. Bonus: Your students can find out their British name. Mine is Shannon.

Teach percentiles, medians, and I/O's Holland Inventory with this data investigating the relationship between job salary AND Holland personality match for the job. Spoiler alert: This data also provides an example of a non-significant correlation. Bonus: Your students can find out their own Holland Inventory type.

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