SOAN 3120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Celsius, Pie Chart, Categorical Variable

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SOAN 3120
• Professor: Andrew Hathaway

Document Summary

*statistics part science, part art form often highly interpretive. Given the raw data and ability to examine them graphically, careful analysis makes deception more difficult. Always be critical when evaluating a study. Be wary of omissions and selective presentation of the data. Importance of replication results: looking at the numbers, they look reasonable. Data sets make up cases: could be people, groups, companies, countries etc, the particular focus of our analysis. Individual cases are made up of variables: something that can take on different values, characteristics, age, gender, occupation, social class etc, if nothing varies, there is nothing to analyze. Categorical variables differentiated by name: different analysis are necessary for different variables, gender, eye color, occupation etc, nominal (name only) Quantitative variables take on numerical values of a given unit of measure: age, income, height, usually have some unit attached that you need to be sure of (inches, meters, dollars, etc. )