APSY2216 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Statistical Inference, Percentile Rank, Descriptive Statistics

• School: Boston College
• Department: Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology
• Course: APSY2216
• Professor: Thomson

Document Summary

Today and next week: quantitative data analysis and review for exam 2. Remaining assignments: research plan due today and research in real life 3 due april 21. In quantitative research, we collect data from a sample but are interested in a broader population. No guarantee that a particular sample is representative of the population. Participants" performance on any given day can be influenced by a variety of factors beyond our control (lack of sleep, not paying attention, etc. ) Statistics provide us with the tools that allow us to bridge the gap between the sample and population. Allow us to better understand patterns that we observe in a sample (descriptive statistics) Allow us to figure out how much of what we observe in a sample is truly reflective of the population and how much is due to random chance (inferential statistics) Descriptive statistics - summarize sample data and describe general trends in the data.