PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Descriptive Statistics, Frequency Distribution, Central Tendency

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

Data and information: psychological observations start as data and are converted into information. Information- is data that has been organized and made useful. Collapsing data: when you collect data, the sheer amount can often be quite overwhelming. The purpose of descriptive statistics is to summarize the data in a meaningful fashion. Ex- mean, median, and mode of distribution: a type of descriptive statistics could be a frequency distribution. Frequency distribution a table that describes the number of x, y, z, etc. represented in the list. Normal distribution- a distribution of data following a bell-shaped probability function. Ex- because of the mathematics of sampling, many data samples follow this distribution, especially in their middle region, after the sample size becomes sufficiently large. This makes the normal distribution a useful mathematical model. Typical data set- the centre of the normal distribution is the average (mean) of the distribution, as well as the median and mode of the distribution.