ENVS178 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Five Ws

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Environmental Studies
• Course: ENVS178
• Professor: Jeff Casello

Document Summary

Data: any collection of numbers, characters, images or other items that provide information of something. Statistics helps us make sense of the world by seeing past the underlying variation to ind patterns and relationships. If we don"t know what attributes/characteristics are being measured and what is measured about them, the values displayed are meaningless. We can make the meaning clear if we organize values into a data table. Context: establish the five w"s : who, what, where, when and (if possible) why as well as how. In general, the rows of a data table correspond to individual cases about whom (or about which) we record some characteristics. Individuals who answer a survey are called respondents. People on whom we experiment are called subjects or participants. Animals, plants, web sites, and other inanimate subjects are called experimental units. Often the cases are a sample from some larger population that we would like to understand.