Lecture 1 Terms

Descriptive Statistics

statistics concerned with describing the characteristics of the known data thereby providing summaries about the population data or the sample data.

Significant difference

when the observed difference in the sample population is unlikely due to chance – rather, there is likely a real difference between the groups if you were to predict differences in the entire population of interest (e.g., p < .05)

Inferential statistics

A branch of statistics that makes the use of various analytical tools to draw inferences about the population data from sample data (i.e., to discover some property or pattern about a large group by studying a smaller group of people).

Empirical paper

Reports, for the first time, the results from a newly-collected
research study

Review Paper

Integrates together all published studies that have been done
in one research area

Availability heuristic

A cognitive shortcut where people judge the
likelihood of an event based on how easily examples or instances of that
event come to mind, often leading to biased judgments.

Effect Size

A way to quantify the difference or association between two groups or variables