PSYA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Square Root, Falsifiability, Central Tendency
Document Summary
The scientific process (usually) begins with a theory: which is somebody"s explanation meant to explain things they have seen. Good theories lead to hypotheses: which are predictions that be empirically tested in a way that might prove them to be incorrect (ie. falsifiable) If you measure some variable across many people you can sometimes end up with a lot of data too much data to make sense of when it"s presented in raw form. Imagine students in a small class were asked their age and you got this dataset (21. 20,23,21,23,22,20,21,22,22,21,25,19,22,21,23,26,24) We gotta examine statistics, and how they are used. Descriptive statistics: you got a bunch of numbers but you want to condense them to an audience, so you not talking about the whole data set. Most things are normally distributed therefore we can try to capture the whole picture with two values: One value that represents the middle and another that represents the spread and how wide the distribution is.
