RDA chapter 5

Statistical Evaluation of Data

Descriptive statistics

methods that help researchers organize, summarize and simplify results

Inferential statistics

Methods that use results obtained from samples to help generalize about populations

Statistics Prime 2 purposes

1. To help organize/organize

2. To help answer general questions that initiated the research

population

Entire set of individuals of interest aka target population

sample

group of individuals from a population intended to represent the population in a research study

Parameter

a summary value that describes a population

statistic

summary value that describes a sample

frequency distributions

method of simplifying and organizing a set of scores by grouping them into an organized display

Histogram

bars touch each other

polygon

Displays a point above each score

bar graph

bars that do not touch

central tendency

statistical measure that identifies a single score

central tendency is measured by

1. mean

2. median

3. mode

Mean

Mathematical average of the scores

median

score that divides a distribution in half

mode

The most commonly occurred score