POL SCI 3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Jollof Rice, Standard Deviation, Central Tendency
Document Summary
Measures of central tendency: mode, mean, median. Measures of variability: range, variance, standard deviation. Frequencies can either be reported by a table or by a chart. Reporting frequency is typically only informative in a nominal (categorical) data. Three fundamental types of statistics: descriptive: explains trends in your sample, central tendency. Significance of means: determines whether differences between groups of individuals are large enough to be meaningful. Relationship between variables: compares the relationship between multiple variables within the same sample of individuals. Example: june received a score of 20 on the extraversion personality. With just this information, we cannot interpret her score. June has less extraversion than the typical person because he score of 20 was less than the average score of 30. June is one standard deviation below the mean, so she has considerably less extraversion than most people. Mode: most frequent score: from earlier example, jollof rice, best for nominal (categorical) data, represent by a pie graph.
