PSYC 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Descriptive Statistics, Human Hair Color, Categorical Variable
20 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
The basics: intro to statistics, variables, and research methods. What are statistics: statistics are used to summarize large amounts of information (data), and use those data to answer real-world questions. Tools for organizing, describing, and interpreting information : there are two main types of statistics. Inferential statistics: make inferences about a larger group. Samples and populations: a population is a group we want to learn something about, we typically can"t study everyone in the population, so instead we study a sample of people from that population. We want to know the average gpa of towson students. Since we can"t survey everyone, we just survey 50 people. This should give us a pretty good estimate of what the college-wide average is: sampling error: is the difference between the estimate we got from our sample (the statistic) and the actual value in the population (the parameter) Make sure that your sample is large and representative.
