PSYC 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Statistical Inference, Standard Deviation, Regression Analysis
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A statistically significant effect in a study is one that is not likely to be due to chance. Effect size refers to the magnitude of the patterns in the data. Patterns may refer to relationships among variables (correlations) or to differences across conditions of a study. Statistical significance and effect size are independent so that small effects may be statistically significant and large effects may not be statistically significant. A variable is some attribute for which there is some level of variation in scores. A value is a possible score on some measure of a variable. A score is an actual data point on the measure of the variable. Continuous variables values that vary by degree: values may be negative, values may have decimals. Ordinal variables the values indicate ranks. A measure of central tendency is a summary score for a sample of scores on a continuous variable. The measure of central tendency identifies a typical score for the sample.