PSYC 2030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Null Hypothesis, Statistical Inference, Statistical Significance
30 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
Descriptive statistics (describing what the data looks like) Central tendencies: mean (sum/number of scores, median (middle number, helpful when there is outliers, mode (most frequent score) The normal distribution: 68% of all scores are within 1 sd of the mean, 95% within 2 sd. Statistics can lie (by using certain numbers that are not representative of the data) You can use statistics to prove anything. When not reported properly, statistics can be misleading. Relative vs absolute: relative (we know twice as much as we did last year, absolute (we learned 1% last year, and now we know 2% (twice), this is used to mislead people. Graphing data: they are used to visualize data. They can be useful if done properly, but can be misleading if not. Inferential statistics (making inferences or guesses about the population on which the sample was drawn)
