Sociology 2206A/B Lecture : March 5.docx

• School: Western University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: Sociology 2206A/B
• Professor: Ryan Broll

Document Summary

Only describing one variable at a a time. Frequency distributions: raw numbers or percentages. Discrete- fixed set of categories, people fit into one category, religion, marital. Continuous- infinite number of variables, temperature, age, income, Levels of measurement- depending on this you can do different statistical tests: nominal- only have different categories, ordinal- can be ranked, interval- actual difference between the categories, ratio- ideal, have a 0. You want a quick and easy measure. You want to report the most common score. Bi-modal when you have more then one mode. Variables at the interval-ratio level have highly skewed distributions. You want to report the central score. Gives a true sense of the data, unaffected by extremely low cases. You want to report a typical score. Extreme highs and lows can have a large impact on the mean. Most commonly reported measure of central tendency. Range- simplest, difference between the smallest and the largest score: 2, 3, 4, 7 range is 5.