PSYC 3000 Lecture 2: PSYC 3000 - Class 2
16 Sep 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Variable: any characteristic observed in a study (ex. High temperature, low temperature, cloud cover, whether it rained, and number of centimeters of precipitation). A variable can be classified as either categorical or quantitative. Distribution of a variable: describes how the observations fall (are distributed) across the range of possible values. (i. e. graphs and frequency tables are used to look for key features of a distribution). A variable can be classified as categorical if each observation belongs to one of a set of distinct categories. A variable is called quantitative if observations on it take numerical values that represent different magnitudes of the variable. Key features the relative number of observations in the various categories. Key features the centre and variability (spread) of the data. Continuos quantitative variable: a quantitative variable is continuous if its possible values form an interval. These variable have an infinite number of possible values (ex. Height, weight, age, amount of time to complete an assignment)
