HTHSCI 2S03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Level Of Measurement
3 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Statistics can be used in 2 ways: to describe data, and to make inferences about them. Descriptive statistics: concerned with the presentation, organization, & summarization of data. Inferential statistics: allow us to generalize from our sample of data to a larger group of subjects. Variables: what is being observed or measured, can either be independent or dependent. Dependent: outcome of interest, which should change in response to some intervention, Sometimes independent variable doesn"t have to be an (cid:873)intervention(cid:874) or (cid:873)manipulated(cid:874) but it still affects the outcome of the dependent (cid:840)eg. age"s effect on the # of words a child can speak) Both variables can take one of a number of values: eg. male or female, hair colour options, or a range of numbers (like for measuring height). Variables can be different in respect to the type and number of values they can assume. One way to differentiate bw variable is to decide whether the values are discrete or continuous.
