AP Statistics - Unit 1

Designing Studies

Quantitative Data / Numerical Data

Numerical values for which arithmetic operations make sense (you can average)

Qualitative Data / Categorical Data

COUNT data. Recording which category a person or thing falls into.
Data that represent categories or qualities and cannot be measured numerically, such as names or labels.

Discrete Data

Values are only isolated points on a number line.

Quantitative data that can take only certain values, often counted, such as the number of students in a classroom.

Continuous Data

Values are from an entire interval on the number line, measurements of time or lengths.

Population (of interest)

The entire group that we are interested in studying

Parameter (of interest)

A numerical measurement describing some characteristics of a population. For categorical data, this is usually a proportion (or percentage), while for numberical data this is usually a mean.

Sample

The subset of a population this is actually examined.

Statistic

A numerical measurement describing some characteristic of a sample.