Chapter 12 - Quantitative Analysis

Question 1

descriptive statistics

Answer 1

procedures for organizing and summarizing data

Question 2

inferential statistics

Answer 2

procedures for determining the extent to which one may generalize beyond the data at hand

Question 3

data processing

Answer 3

the preparation of data for analysis

Question 4

data matrix

Answer 4

form of a computer datafile, with rows as cases and columns as variables; each cell represents the value of a particular variable (column) for a particular case (row)

Question 5

missing data

Answer 5

the absence of information on a variable for a given case

Question 6

data cleaning

Answer 6

detection and correction of errors in a computer data file that may have occurred during data collection, coding, or data entry

Question 7

wild-code checking

Answer 7

data-cleaning procedure involving checking for out-of-range and other ‘illegal’ codes among the values recorded for each variable

Question 8

consistency checking

Answer 8

data-cleaning procedure involving checking for unreasonable

Question 9

univariate analysis

Answer 9

statistical analysis of one variable at a time

Question 10

frequency distribution

Answer 10

tabulation of the number of cases falling into each category of a variable

Question 11

percentage distribution

Answer 11

norming operation that facilitates interpreting and comparing frequency distributions by transforming each frequency to a common yardstick of 100 units in length; the number of cases in each category is divided by the total and multiplied by 100

Question 12

N

Answer 12

abbreviation representing the # of observations on which a statistic is based

Question 13

mean

Answer 13

average value of a dataset

Question 14

median

Answer 14

midpoint in a distribution

Question 15

mode

Answer 15

value or category of a frequency distribution having the highest frequency

Question 16

range

Answer 16

difference between the lowest and highest values

Question 17

standard deviation

Answer 17

measure of variability or dispersion that indicates the average ‘spread’ of observations about the mean

Question 18

outliers

Answer 18

unusual or suspicious values that are far removed from the preponderance of observations for a variable

Question 19

listwise deletion

Answer 19

missing values in multivariate analysis that excludes cases which have missing values on any of the variables in the analysis

Question 20

imputation

Answer 20

procedure for handling missing data in which values are assigned based on other information such as the sample mean or known values of other variables

Question 21

bivariate analysis

Answer 21

statistical analysis of the relationship between two variables

Question 22

marginal frequencies

Answer 22

row + column table in a contingency table (cross-tabulation) that represent the univariate frequency distributions for the row and column variables

Question 23

cell frequency

Answer 23

number of cases in a cell of a cross-tabulation (contingency table)

Question 24

measures of association

Answer 24

descriptive statistics used to measure the strength and direction of a bivariate relationship (0 = no association; 1 = perfect association)

Question 25

regression analysis

Answer 25

statistical method for analyzing bivariate (simple) and multivariate (multiple) relationships among interval- or ratio-scale variables

Question 26

scatterplot

Answer 26

graph plotting the values of two variables for each observation