Basic Statistical Concepts

These flashcards cover the basic concepts of statistics, including descriptive statistics, types of distributions, measures of central tendency, and variability.

What do descriptive statistics help us do with collected data?

Descriptive statistics summarize the data to make it more comprehensible.

What is frequency in the context of descriptive statistics?

Frequency refers to how frequently a particular observation occurs in the data.

What is a typical graphical representation for frequency?

Frequency is typically represented using a histogram.

What does a normal distribution look like?

A normal distribution is symmetrical and bell-shaped, with the left and right sides being the same.

What does it mean if a distribution is negatively skewed?

A negatively skewed distribution has a long tail pointing towards the negative side of the number line, often occurring when data is bunched up on the right side.

How can you identify if a distribution is positively skewed?

A positively skewed distribution has a long tail pointing towards the positive side of the number line, with data clustered on the left side.

What are the three measures of central tendency?

The three measures of central tendency are mean, median, and mode.

What is the median?

The median is the middlemost number in a set of ordered numbers.

How does skewed distribution affect mean, median, and mode?

In skewed distributions, the mean is typically higher than the median, which is higher than the mode.

What is variability in statistics?

Variability refers to how spread out the values are in a data set.

What does standard deviation represent?

Standard deviation represents units of distance away from the mean or central tendency.

How much of the observations falls within one standard deviation of the mean in a normal distribution?

Approximately 68% of the observations fall within one standard deviation above and below the mean.

What does it mean if a distribution has high variability?

High variability indicates that the scores are more spread out rather than tightly clustered around the measure of central tendency.