Statistics Flashcards
The Scientific Method
A logical, systematic approach to the solution of a scientific problem
- Develop theory; observations, literature review, prior research
- Construct a hypothesis
- Design a study
- Analyse data
- Draw conclusions
What is a parameter?
A numerical summary of a population. Such as mean, median, range… of a population
What are the types of data?
- Quantitative; numeric i.e. age, height, weight
- Qualitative; descriptive i.e. favourite colour, suburb, type of car
What does discrete data include?
Only limited set of values
- Nominal: values where order is arbitrary (i.e. gender, ethnicity, etc), unordered, categorical also known as binary, dichotomous, indicator variable (qualitative)
- Ordinal: scale where ranking matters but are not consistently correlated (i.e. NYHA), ordered categorical (e.g. level of education, high-school, under/post degree) (qualitative OR quantitative)
What does continuous data include?
Unlimited values
- Interval: have legit mathematical values (i.e. temperature), numeric scale with consistent differences between points (i.e. standardist IQ) (quantitative)
- Ratio: equal intervals and meaningful zero point (i.e. height, wt, time, length), numeric scale with consistent differences between points and absolute zero (weight in kilos) (quantitative)
When does experimental manipulation occur?
Between subjects -> independent groups
- Within subjects/repeated measures: related groups
What is measurement error?
An error that occurs when there is a difference between the information desired by the researcher and the information provided by the measurement process
What are extraneous and confounding variables?
Extraneous: another variable that is not the IV or DV
Confounding: An extraneous variable that can potentially explain the relationship between the IV and DV
- Example: age reading ability, year of school in children
- IV: age, DV: reading ability, Confound: year of school
What is the measurement type of the variables?
Categorical data: discrete categories or groups
- Frequency tables and bar chart / pie chart
- Numeric data: a score on a scale
- Numeric summary statistics (mean/median/mode, standard deviation) and a histogram
Consider the following aspects when summarising data:
- Typicality (mean, median and mode)
- Variability (range, IQR, std dev, variance)
- Shape (skew, kurtosis)
What features does a normal distribution have?
- Variability
- Unimodality
- Central tendency
- Symmetrical
- Mesokurtic
What is a z-score?
Z-scores are standardised scores, measuring the difference between a score and the mean, expressed in std dev units
z = score - mean / std dev
What is the central limit theorem?
- Distribution of sample means will be approximately normal
- Mean of the sample means will be the same as the population mean
What is standard error?
- Standard deviation of sample means = Standard Error
- Standard Error = std dev / square root N
What is null hypothesis significance testing?
- Analysing data from a sample, to see whether it can make a contribution to a field of knowledge
- Conservative approach: begin by assuming the null hypothesis is true, then
test whether we have evidence against that - Summarise data and compute a test statistic