Wong, Sze Ka. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-60). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Introduction --- p.1 / The Heuristic-Systematic Model (HSM) --- p.4 / Positive and negative heuristic processing --- p.5 / Systematic processing and involvement with the corporation --- p.9 / Social Judgment Theory (SJT) --- p.11 / "Favorable change in perceived transport reliability statistics, perceived service quality and value for money" --- p.15 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Method --- p.17 / Participants --- p.17 / Procedures --- p.17 / Measures --- p.19 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Result --- p.28 / Validity Check --- p.28 / Demographic variables --- p.29 / Data Transformation --- p.29 / Dimensionality --- p.30 / Reliability --- p.37 / Model testing results --- p.38 / Hypothesis testing --- p.39 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- Discussion --- p.41 / The effect of discrepancy between one's own attitude and message position on favorable change in perceived transport reliability --- p.41 / The effect of favorable change in perceived transport reliability --- p.42 / The strong effect of positive heuristic processing and general attitude change --- p.43 / The limited role played by systematic processing --- p.45 / Implications for practitioners --- p.47 / Limitation of the present study and further research direction --- p.49 / Appendix 1: Measurement items --- p.53 / Appendix 2: Categorization of heuristic and systematic processing --- p.56 / References --- p.57

The purpose of this exploratory research was to investigate potential factors (i.e. gender, time lapse between the latest statistics class and completion of the statistics test, grade point average (GPA), attitude towards statistics), which are associated with the comprehension and retention of statistical knowledge in Baccalaureate Psychology students. The criterion variable was statistical competency, which was measured in five subdomains: basic concepts, descriptives, correlation/regression, hypothesis testing, and inferential statistics.