PSY1022 Chapter Notes - Chapter Prescribed: Unimodality, Statistical Inference, Central Tendency
26 May 2018
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PSY1022 – Readings – Week 11 – Summarising data using descriptive stats
- descriptive statistics
• are methods that help researchers organise, summarise, and simplify the
results obtained from research studies
• help describe data
- inferential statistics
• methods that use the results obtained from samples to help make
generalisations about populations
- terminology
• statistic - a summary value that describes a sample. a common example is
the average score for a sample
• parameter - a summary value that describes a population, a common
example is the average score for a population
- frequency distributions
• consists of a tabulation of the number of individuals in each category on
the scale of measurement
• displays two sets of information
•
o the set of categories that make up the scale of measurement
o the number of individuals with scores in each of the categories
• advantage
•
o allows a researcher to view the entire set of scores
• disadvantage
•
o constructing a frequency distribution without a computer can be
tedious
• frequency distribution tables
•
o consists of two columns of information
o first column - presets the scale of measurement or lists the
categories which individuals have been assigned
o the second column lists the frequency or number of individuals
located in each category
• generally considered to be preliminary methods of statistical analysis
• frequency distribution graphs
•
o shows the scale of measurement/categories along the horizontal
axis and the frequencies on the vertical axis
o histogram
o
▪ numerical
▪ shows a bar above each score so that the height of the bar
indicates the frequency of occurrence for that particular
score
o polygon
o
▪ numerical
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