PSYC 305 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Visual Analogue Scale, Glucosamine, Simple Random Sample

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 305
• Professor: Heungsun Hwang

Document Summary

Hypothesis: answer to a research question or assumption made about a population parameter (not sample estimate!) Sample estimates, however, are not real information they are just a guess or an expectation. Any property about the population (e. g. , population mean) Getting 1 million will make people happier 6 months later. Drug a will increase survival rate of aids patients. Usually a prediction that there is an effect of certain variable(s) in the population. What this means: hamburgers have an effect on your weight. We need to set up two hypotheses at the same time: the first one is the null hypothesis (the base hypothesis) This hypothesis says that there is no effect (cid:523)(cid:498)people will be equally fat regardless of how many hamburgers they eat. (cid:499)(cid:524) We must decide whether to reject the null hypothesis or not. This is the second hypothesis that we must test. The alternative hypothesis simply means that the null hypothesis is not true.