PSYC 1010 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Central Tendency, Standard Deviation, Descriptive Statistics

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Rebecca Jubis

Document Summary

Doubt big, round, undocumented numbers: nd precise more credible numbers. Once researchers have data they may use descriptive statistic to organize that data meaningfully: one way to do this is to convert the data into a simple bar graph. Remember: think smart, when looking at graphs consider the scale labels and their ranges. It is important to specify which central tendency is being used since means can biased by a few extreme scores. The central tendency cannot tell us about the amount of variation in the data - how similar or diverse the scores are: averages derived from scores w/ low variability is more reliable. The range the gap bw the lowest and highest- provides only a crude estimate of variations. A more useful standard for measuring how the scores deviate from one another is the standard deviation - a computed measure of how scores vary around the mean score. Large data samples usually form a symmetrical, bell-shaped distribution.