SOAN 2120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Descriptive Statistics, Standard Deviation

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SOAN 2120
• Professor: D Walters

Document Summary

Involves using small groups of numbers to understand the bigger picture. Stats= how to make sense of data. Population= group you need info about, group you are gathering data from. Use a sample to represent the population as a whole. Sample= randomly selected portion of the population. 5 steps: identify the question and the population: determine the design of the experiment, establish a method to collect data, choose a procedure for making inferences, see how reliable the inferences you made are. Descriptive statistics describe the characteristics of the population. Distribution curve looks like a bell, similar to a histogram except a histogram divides it into boxes. Histogram: classes, class width, class boundaries, class frequency, class relative frequency range= largest value minus smallest. Histogram= smaller samples, distribution curve= larger stem and leaf display= similar to histogram but instead you put the numbers into a pattern, not a line/ box.