Module 1: Measures of Central Tendency and Variability

1. Week 1: Introduction and descriptive statistics

1.1. Statistics: A scientific discipline that applies mathematical procedures to describe and understand data.

1.1.1. Descriptive statistics - procedures that are used to reduce quantitative data from many data points to fewer data points.

1.1.1.1. Measures of Central Tendency: Numbers that tell us about the most "typical" value in a data-set (used to represent a data-set)

1.1.1.1.1. Mean - the sum of all the data points divided by number of data points.

1.1.1.1.2. Median - Individual score at the 50th percentile (score where half of the data points have a lower value and half have a higher value)

1.1.1.1.3. Mode - Most frequently occurring score in dataset (no formula)

1.1.1.2. Measures of Variability: Numbers that tells us about how "spread out" the data points are (usually relative to mean/average)

1.1.1.2.1. Range

1.1.1.2.2. Variance

1.1.1.2.3. Standard Deviation

1.1.2. Inferential statistics - procedures that use descriptive statistics to make inferences (guesses) about populations.

1.1.2.1. More on these in Module's 2 and 3!

1.2. Data: Traits, characteristics and events that can be described numerically (quantitative) or verbally (qualitative)

1.2.1. age

1.2.1.1. quantitative

1.2.2. height

1.2.2.1. quantitative

1.2.3. gpa

1.2.3.1. quantitative

1.2.4. gender

1.2.4.1. qualitative