PS296 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Descriptive Statistics, Statistical Inference, Dependent And Independent Variables
Document Summary
Wednesday, january 13, 2016. Research idea- - >background research- - >conduct research- - >statistical analysis- - >present your findings. Statistics are a set of procedures and rules used to make sense of data. The result of mathematical manipulation applied to data. Descriptive statistics: provide information about individual variables. Used to describe data (age, gender ) Inferential statistics: used to understand the relationship between variables. Sample data are used to make predictions about a larger population (age and stress, gender and attention levels ) Numerical values associated with a population are called parameters. Population: everything or everyone you"re interested in, the complete set of people or things being studied. Sample: subset of the population from which data are collected. Numerical values associated with a sample are called statistics. Data obtained from a sample are used to make inferences about the larger population. Concept that can be measured. (stress, reaction time ) Discrete variables: variables with a finite number of values.