SW 300 Chapter Notes - Chapter 15: Michael Williams (Geographer), Statistical Inference, Frequency Distribution
Document Summary
Descriptive statistics: simply describe and summarize one or more variables for a sample or population. Inferential statistics: determine whether we can generalize findings derived from a sample to the population from which the sample was drawn. Commonly used in most quantitative and qualitative research studies. Describe and summarize a variable(s) of interest and portray how that particular variable is distributed in the sample, or population. After obtaining a measurement or number, it is called the raw score until it has been sorted or analyzed in some way. Descriptive statistics will provide a picture of the characteristics of the group. Inferential statistics will look for relationships between some of the variables. Types of descriptive statistics: frequency distributions. Counting the occurrences of each value, or category, of the variable and ordering them in some fashion. This absolute or simple frequency distribution allows us to see how certain values of a variable are distributed in our sample.
