Psychology Making Sense of Data 1010

Psychology Making Sense of Data 1010 – Lecture Notes Week 1 Weeks Reading Chapter 1 Notes:  We divide statistics into two main branches: Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics  Descriptive statistics a ...

Psychology Making Sense of Data 1010 – Lecture Notes Week 1 Weeks Reading Chapter 1 Notes:  We divide statistics into two main branches: Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics  Descriptive statistics are used to describe and summarize a set of numbers (e.g. our data)  Most scientific contexts are dealing with far too much data to simply eyeball Inferential Statistics  are used to allow us to draw conclusions about a population from a sample of data  What’s a sample? What’s a population  A population is the entire set of observations (usually people in psychology, but in general, the entire set of observations) in whi24ch were interested  A sample set is a set of observations drawn from the population  Ex. Let’s say were interested in the height of Canadians  What’s the population in this case? o All Canadians would be population o Were unlikely to actually measure the heights of all Canadians – most likely to do sample of Canadians  You can and do sample an entire sometimes  Let’s say I’m interested in the height of everyone in this class – that’s something I could reasonably measure for the 250 people. This case the sample is the population Different Variables  Some variables are discrete: taking on whole-number values  Ex. If I ask you how many books you own, that’s a discrete observation (unless you happen to own part of a book, which would make it a continuous observation)  Some variables are comprised of continuous observations: observation that can take on real numbers (numbers with decimals places)  Ex. You weight 80.5532 kg (continuous observation)