POLS 2503 Lecture 7: 10.18 Descriptive Statistics
30 Dec 2018
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Marketed by milton bradley in us as chutes and ladders in 1943. Lesson: recruiting more people does not average but lowers variance. Goal of descriptive statistics is to summarize the data and tell a simple story. A diagram consisting of rectangles whose area is proportional to the frequency of a variable and whose width is equal to the class interval. Variance - average squared difference from mean. Average of deviation vs deviations from the mean. On average how big are those differences. Frequently look at how many standard deviations away from mean. Put in standardized units to make common. Calculate the variance and standard deviation of a response. Excel (google sheet) will do this for you = stdev() Your survey: substantive topic you care about, important explanatory variables, demographic variables for subset analysis, share with neighbor. Take turns: revise questions, walk across room and ask questions of someone else.
