PSY 2106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Statistic, Statistical Parameter, Standard Deviation

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 2106
• Professor: Brenda Baird

Document Summary

Statistics: a branch of mathematics that involves the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, a procedure of how we do research, the two main branches of statistics assist your decisions in different ways. Variability (a measure that tells you how far apart the scores are in a specific test) Answer is based on statistical tests of significance. Who are the participants of a study: populations: the entire set of things of interest, samples: the subset of the population from which you get information. A way to get an inference of how the larger population behaves. Often not practical to study an entire population. Sampling: we select a number of cases to represent the population, and use those cases (group) as a sample estimate of the unknown population. Statistics vs. parameters description to inference computed from a known sample. Sample statistics include the mean, variance, and standard deviation: this is a way to get at the population parameters.