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STATISTICS

Refers to a collection of tests or techniques that are applied to the data, or observations, which social scientists have gathered. There are two categories of statistics: descriptive and inferential. Descriptive statistics are used to describe characteristics of the sample or population the researcher is working with, for example one can calculate a mean, standard deviation, etc. Inferential statistics are used for drawing inferences about a population based on the observations of a sample. For example, reports of opinion polls routinely note that ‘a sample of this size is accurate to within x% 19 times out of 20’. This is the inference to be drawn about the population from which the sample was drawn.

Last updated 2002--0-9-

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© Robert Drislane, Ph.D. and Gary Parkinson, Ph.D.
The online version of this dictionary is a product of
Athabasca University and
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*This social science dictionary has 1000
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