Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Frequency Distribution, Standard Deviation, Square Root

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

Usually means we"re looking at data sets: a bunch of numbers (distribution) Raw distribution - the numbers, unchanged (i. e. individual test scores of students) Frequency distribution - (scores, and frequency of each score) This is what statistics is - capturing complex info with a number. Add up the numbers and divide by n (number of students) For odd number of scores, take the arithmetic mean of the two. Mode (xmas) = 54 --> frequency of 47, 47 people got 54 on the exam. Look at the shape of distribution graph (i. e. bell curve?) *easy to calculate, but maybe not as useful. Same value can be obtained with a variety of scores (e. g. 84-10=74) Variance (s^2) * don"t need to know how to calculate. Degree of fluctuation of scores around the mean. Some distributions have high variance, others are relatively low. Often use the term standard deviation (s or sd) instead of variance