Summary: Statistics For The Behavioral Sciences | 9781483322254 | Gregory J Privitera

Read the summary and the most important questions on Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences | 9781483322254 | Gregory J. Privitera

• 1 Introduction to Statistics

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• One of the most primordial terms in statistics are 'variables' and 'units of analysis'. What is the difference between the two?

  • Units of analysis.
    
  • What or who you are studying.
  • E.g., individuals, families, countries, companies, university programmes, etc.
  • Variables.
  • A measured property of the unit of analysis. 
  • E.g., individual's age, number of family members, countries' GDP, number of student per university programme. 

• When you analyse a dataset, what are the three basic types of analysis you can use?

  • Univariate.
    
  • When you only analyse a single variable.
  • E.g., What is the average grade of IBACS students in the academic year of 2023-2024?
  • Bivariate.
  • When you analyse two variables simultaneously to explore the relationship or correlation between them. 
  • E.g., did male and female students differ in their grades?
  • Multivariate.
  • Understanding the relationships and patterns among multiple variables at once by analysing three or more variables simultaneously.
  • E.g., was the grade dependent on time spent on reading, attendance to lectures and gender?

• For what and how do we use descriptive statistics?

  Are procedures used to summarize, organize, and make sense of a set of scores or observations. Descriptive statistics are typically presented graphically, in tabular form (in tables), or as summary statistics (single values).

• For what and how do we use inferential statistics?

  - Statement about a population from a sample. 
  - Are procedures used that allow researchers to infer or generalize observations made with samples to the larger population from which they were selected

• What is a population?

  The set of all individuals, item, or data of interest
  - Basically, it is everyone/every object your research question deals with

• What type of measurement level are there?

  1. Nominal (No ranking/hyrachy)
  2. Ordinal (ORDer)
  3. Interval (logical distance, rank ordered, no true zero)
  4. Ratio ('', true zero point)

• What is measured in whole units or categories?

  Discrete variable

• What is a Variable?

  A measure property of the unit of analysis

• What are the central tendency?

  1. Mean (average)
  2. Median (middle, 50th percentile)
  3. Mode (largest amount of cases)

• 1.5 Types of Variables for Which Data Are Measured

• What is the difference between continuous and discrete variables?

  • Continuous variables are measured along a continuum.
  • I.e., measured at any place beyond the decimal point, or variables that you could  (in theory) measure until a trillionth place beyond the decimal point. 
  • E.g., Lap time in F1 Qualifying.
  • Discrete variables are variables measured in whole units or categories.
  • E.g., number of brothers and sisters, number of visits to De Efteling.