Lecture 11- Intro and Descriptive Stats Flashcards
What are the four goals of science related to statistical analysis?
- Describe: patterns of data
- Explain: from hypothesis testing to the real world
- Predict: from models to the future real world. Models are simply equations. Models change and become obsolete.
- Control: techniques to control for randomness: real effect or chance?
What are Qualitative studies?
People + context. interviews, observations, themes of thought. Results described in language not numbers. More difficult! (require a lot of thought). Allows understanding of how humans think and behave in the real world, we are not normally manipulating the situation.
What are quantitative studies?
People + numbers. Patterns of numbers to represent and test. Results described by statistics. Statistics translated to language to allow normal people to understand. Allows more fine control over investigations (lab based= control of environment, we are doing the manipulation)
What are three measures of central tendency when would you use each?
- mean/ average, median, mode
- Only means can be used in inferential statistics as T-tests and ANOVA’s work with averages.
- Be aware though when summarizing the mean is vulnerable to extreme scores and this can make it a less valid measure of central tendency. Can sometimes be used to advantage of company/ government (e.g. mean salary skewed by some individuals who have extremely high salaries, median + mode on the other hand are not skewed by outliers).
What are two different measures of variance?
Simplest way is the range (largest number – smallest value). Standard deviation + variance is more common, based on how far each score is from the mean (given as average between all data points).
What is the value of descriptive stat values e.g. central tendency?
Concise way of summarizing the data. Reduces a lot of numbers down to a few.
What is useful to see the whole pattern of the data visually? What statistical software can you do this on?
Jamovi
