HTHSCI 2S03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Null Hypothesis, Statistical Significance, Confidence Interval
23 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Our goal is to eventually produce results that we can generalize to the population. We have described data both in pictures and in numbers. We have described data based on the central point around which it revolves (measures of central tendency) and how closely to that point our data lie (measures of dispersion) The dispersion around the central point is of utmost importance in research and statistics. Dispersion (variation) is the central problem in statistics (if we can account for it, we can control it) Measures of variation form the basis of most statistical analyses (e. g. , correlation, regression) The normal distribution variation (dispersion) of many variables tend to follow a bell-shape, symmetrical with the data concentrated more in the middle than in the tails. The normal distribution is: symmetrical about the mean, mean = median = mode, determined by the mean and standard deviation (there are many normal distributions, defined by different means and standard deviations)
