Week Three Flashcards Descriptive Statistics Review

Flashcards covering key concepts and vocabulary associated with descriptive statistics, including measures of central tendency, dispersion, distributions, and statistical terminology.

Descriptive Statistics

Statistics used to summarize responses from a sample or characterize the sample.

Inferential Statistics

Statistics used to estimate population parameters and test hypotheses without doing a census.

Frequency Distribution

A distribution showing the frequency of occurrence at each category or level of a variable.

Central Tendency

Measures that describe the center point of a distribution, including the mode, median, and mean.

Range

The difference between the highest and lowest scores in a distribution.

Interquartile Range (IQR)

The distance between the first and third quartiles in a distribution.

Standard Deviation (SD)

A measure of how much all scores tend to vary from the sample mean.

Normal Distribution

A symmetrical distribution where most scores cluster around the mean.

Skewness

The asymmetry of a distribution; can be positively or negatively skewed.

Kurtosis

The degree of peakedness of a distribution.

Z score

A measure of how far a specific unit is above or below the sample mean in standard deviation units.

Boxplot

A graphical representation that displays the distribution of data based on five summary statistics: minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile, and maximum.

Mode

The most frequently occurring score(s) in a distribution.

Median

The middle score in a sorted distribution.

Mean

The mathematical average of a set of numbers.

Positive Skew

A distribution with a majority of scores clustered on the left, with a long tail on the right.

Negative Skew

A distribution with a majority of scores clustered on the right, with a long tail on the left.

Standard Normal Distribution

A normal distribution where the mean is 0 and the standard deviation is 1.

Percentile

The value below which a given percentage of observations fall.

Outlier

A value that is significantly different from the majority of a data set.