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    Descriptive Statistics

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    nagamani

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    Descriptive Statistics

    Uploaded by

    nagamani
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    3 views32 pages

    Descriptive Statistics

    Uploaded by

    nagamani

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    of 32

    Descriptive statistics

    Statistics
    • Many studies generate large numbers of
    data points, and to make sense of all that
    data, researchers use statistics that
    summarize the data, providing a better
    understanding of overall tendencies within
    the distributions of scores.
    Types of statistics
    • Types of statistics:

    1. descriptive (which summarize some characteristic of


    a sample)
    • Measures of central tendency
    • Measures of dispersion
    • Measures of skewness

    2. inferential (which test for significant differences


    between groups and/or significant relationships
    among variables within the sample
    • t-ratio, chi-square, beta-value
    Reasons for using statistics
    • aids in summarizing the results
    • helps us recognize underlying trends and
    tendencies in the data
    • aids in communicating the results to others
    Descriptive statistics
    • If we wanted to characterize the students in this class we
    would find that they are:
    – Young
    – From Kentucky
    – Fit
    – Male

    • How young?
    • How Kentuckian is this class?
    • How fit is this class?
    • What is the distribution of males and females?
    Frequency distribution
    • The frequency with which observations are
    assigned to each category or point on a
    measurement scale.
    – Most basic form of descriptive statistics
    – May be expressed as a percentage of the total
    sample found in each category

    Source : Reasoning with Statistics, by Frederick Williams &


    Peter Monge, fifth edition, Harcourt College Publishers.
    Frequency distribution
    • The distribution is “read” differently
    depending upon the measurement level
    – Nominal scales are read as discrete
    measurements at each level
    – Ordinal measures show tendencies, but
    categories should not be compared
    – Interval and ratio scales allow for comparison
    among categories
    Ancestry of US residents
    Source: Protecting Children from Harmful Television: TV Ratings and the V-chip
    Amy I. Nathanson, PhD Lecturer, University of California at Santa Barbara
    Joanne Cantor, PhD Professor, Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    Source: UCLA International Institute
    Source: www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/students/bandwidth/charts.html
    Source: www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/students/bandwidth/charts.html
    Source: Verisign
    Normal distribution
    • Many characteristics are distributed through the
    population in a ‘normal’ manner
    – Normal curves have well-defined statistical properties
    – Parametric statistics are based on the assumption that
    the variables are distributed normally
    • Most commonly used statistics
    • This is the famous “Bell curve” where many cases
    fall near the middle of the distribution and few fall
    very high or very low
    – I.Q.
    I.Q. distribution
    Measures of central tendency
    • These measures give us an idea what the ‘typical’
    case in a distribution is like
    • Mode (Mo): the most frequent score in a distribution
    • good for nominal data
    • Median (Mdn): the midpoint or midscore in a
    distribution.
    • (50% cases above/50% cases below)
    – insensitive to extreme cases
    --Interval or ratio

    Source : Reasoning with Statistics, by Frederick Williams & Peter Monge, fifth edition, Harcourt College Publishers.
    Measures of central tendency
    • Mean
    – The ‘average’ score—sum of all individual
    scores divided by the number of scores
    – has a number of useful statistical properties
    • however, can be sensitive to extreme scores
    (“outliers”)
    – many statistics are based on the mean
    Source: www.wilderdom.com/.../L2-1UnderstandingIQ.html
    Statistics estimating dispersion
    • Some statistics look at how widely scattered over
    the scale the individual scores are
    • Groups with identical means can be more or less
    widely dispersed
    • To find out how the group is distributed, we need
    to know how far from or close to the mean
    individual scores are
    • Like the mean, these statistics are only meaningful
    for interval or ratio-level measures
    Estimates of dispersion
    • Range
    • Distance between the highest and lowest scores in
    a distribution;
    • sensitive to extreme scores;
    • Can compensate by calculating interquartile range
    (distance between the 25th and 75th percentile
    points) which represents the range of scores for the
    middle half of a distribution
    Usually used in combination with other measures of
    dispersion.
    Range

    Source: www.animatedsoftware.com/ statglos/sgrange.htm


    Source: http://pse.cs.vt.edu/SoSci/converted/Dispersion_I/box_n_hist.gif
    Estimates of dispersion
    Variance (S2)
    – Average of squared distances of individual points from
    the mean
    • sample variance
    – High variance means that most scores are far away from
    the mean. Low variance indicates that most scores cluster
    tightly about the mean.
    – The amount that one score differs from the mean is called
    its deviation score (deviate)
    – The sum of all deviation scores in a sample is called the
    sum of squares
    Standard Deviation (SD)

    A summary statistic of how much scores vary


    from the mean
    Square root of the Variance
    – expressed in the original units of measurement
    – Represents the average amount of dispersion in
    a sample
    – Used in a number of inferential statistics
    Skewness of distributions
    • Measures look at how lopsided distributions are—how far
    from the ideal of the normal curve they are
    • When the median and the mean are different, the
    distribution is skewed. The greater the difference, the
    greater the skew.
    • Distributions that trail away to the left are negatively
    skewed and those that trail away to the right are positively
    skewed
    • If the skewness is extreme, the researcher should either
    transform the data to make them better resemble a normal
    curve or else use a different set of statistics—
    nonparametric statistics—to carry out the analysis
    Distribution of posting frequency on Usenet
    So
    • Descriptive statistics are used to summarize
    data from individual respondents, etc.
    – They help to make sense of large numbers of
    individual responses, to communicate the
    essence of those responses to others
    • They focus on typical or average scores, the
    dispersion of scores over the available
    responses, and the shape of the response
    curve

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