Descriptive statisics Flashcards
What are inferential statistics?
Allow us to make conclusions related to our hypothesis
What are Descriptive statistics?
Give us a way to summarise and describe our data but don’t allow us to make conclusions related to our hypothesis
What is the mean?
An Average indicating the typical score in a data set.
adds all data together and divided’s by the amount of data
Why is the mean useful?
-Takes all data into account
What is nominal data?
Data in the form of separate categorises such as grouping people according to preferences of food
Why is the mean not very good?
- Could be misleading if there are extreme values which would not be a typical representation of all the data
- Cannot be used when the data is nominal
What is the median?
Calculated by finding the mid point in an ordered list
Why is the median useful?
more useful than the mean when there are extreme values
Why is the median not useful?
- Not all the scores are taken into account
- Cannot be used when the data is nominal
What is the Mode?
The most common value in a set of data
Why is the mode useful?
- Can be used for nominal data
- Useful were other methods of central tendency are meaningless
Why is the mode not useful?
Used less often then other measures because they do not tell us anything about the other values in the distribution
-They are also often not very central
What is the range and when is it most commonly used?
Highest score minus the lowest score most commonly used when we have used the median as the measure of central tendency
When is standard deviation most commonly used?
When we have used the mean as the measure
What is good about SD?
It takes into account every piece of data
