Statistics Flashcards
What is the population?
The entire group of individuals is called the population
What is a sample?
A sample is a group selected to represent the population in a research study e.g. population is too large to examine all
What is a variable?
A characteristic that can change or take on different values e.g. height, gender
What are the two main types of data?
Categorical (Qualitative)
Numerical (Quantitative)
What are two types of Qualitative data?
Nominal- no particular order e.g. Hair colour
Ordinal- some order e.g. pain threshold
What are the two main types of Quantitative data?
• Discrete - data that consist of indivisible categories/fixed numbers. e.g., number of
teeth, number of children in a family
• Continuous - infinitely divisible into whatever units a researcher may choose, e.g. weight
What are two types of continuous data?
Interval- no.s with known differences between variables, e.g. time
Ratio- no.s that have measurable intervals where difference can be determined, such as height or weight
What are the 3 measures of central tendency?
Mean
Median
Mode
What are three measures of dispersion?
Range
Interquartile range
Standard deviation
What does the mean represent?
Average or arithmetic mean of the data
What does the median represent?
The middle value when the scores are ranked in order
What does the mode represent?
Most often occurring value
What does the range represent?
Highest to lowest values; this fails to give an indication of the spread of observations about the mean.
What does the Interquartile range represent?
Values that capture the middle 50% of the
distribution. The upper and lower quartiles are the 75th and 25th percentiles.
What does the standard deviation represent?
How closely do values cluster around the mean value in a normally distributed population. It describes the spread of observations on either side of the mean.