CHAPTER 3: A STATISTICS REFRESHER

Why We Need Statistics?

 Statistics are important for purposes of education

o Numbers provide convenient summaries and allow us to evaluate some observations
relative to others
 We use statistics to make inferences, which are logical deductions about events that cannot be
observed directly
o Detective work of gathering and displaying clues –exploratory data analysis
o Then confirmatory data analysis
 Descriptive statistics are methods used to provide a concise description of a collection of
quantitative information
 Inferential statistics are methods used to make inferences from observations of a small group of
people known as a sample to a larger group of individuals known as a population

SCALES OF MEASUREMENT

 MEASUREMENT – act of assigning numbers or symbols to characteristics of things according to

rules. The rules serves as a guideline for representing the magnitude. It always involves error.
 SCALE – set of numbers whose properties model empirical properties of the objects to which the
numbers are assigned.
 CONTINUOUS SCALE – interval/ratio. A scale used to measure continuous variable. Always
involves error
 DISCRETE SCALE – nominal/ordinal used to measure a discrete variable (ex. Female or male)
 ERROR – collective influence of all of the factors on a test score.

PROPERTIES OF SCALE

 Magnitude, equal intervals, and an absolute 0

Magnitude
 The property of “moreness”
 A scale has the property of magnitude if we can say that a particular instance of the attribute
represents more, less, or equal amounts of the given quantity than does another instance
Equal Intervals
 A scale has the property of equal intervals if the difference between two points at any place on the
scale has the same meaning as the difference between two other points that differ by the same
number of scale units
 A psychological test rarely has the property of equal intervals
 When a scale has the property of equal intervals, the relationship between the measured units
and some outcome can be described by a straight line or a linear equation in the form Y=a+bX
o Shows that an increase in equal units on a given scale reflects equal increases in the
meaningful correlates of units
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Absolute 0
 An Absolute 0 is obtained when nothing of the property being measured exists
 This is extremely difficult/impossible for many psychological qualities
NOMINAL SCALE
 Simplest form of measurement
 Classification or categorization
 Arithmetic operations can be performed with nominal data. Ex.) Male or female
 Also includes test items. Ex.) yes/no responses
ORDINAL SCALE
 Classifies in some kind of ranking order
 Individuals compared to others and assigned a rank
 Imply nothing about how much greater one ranking is than another
 Numbers/ranks do not indicate units of measure
 No absolute zero point
 Binet: believed that data derived from intelligence test are ordinal in nature
INTERVAL SCALE
 In addition to the features of nominal and ordinal scales, contain equal intervals between numbers
 No absolute zero point
 Can take average
RATIO SCALE
 In addition to all the properties of nominal, ordinal, and interval measurement, ratio scale has true
zero point
 Equal intervals between numbers. Ex.) measuring amount of pressure hand can exert
 True zero doesn’t mean someone will receive a score of 0, but means that 0 has meaning

NOTE:
Permissible Operations
 Level of measurement is important because it defines which mathematical operations we can
apply to numerical data
 For nominal data, each observation can be placed in only one mutually exclusive category
 Ordinal measurements can be manipulated using arithmetic
 With interval data, one can apply any arithmetic operation to the differences between scores
o Cannot be used to make statements about ratios
DESCRIBING DATA
 Distribution: set of scores arrayed for recording or study
 Raw Score: straightforward, unmodified accounting of performance, usually numerical
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Frequency Distributions
 Frequency Distribution: All scores listed alongside the number of times each score occurred
 Grouped Frequency Distribution: test-score intervals (class intervals), replace the actual test
scores
o Highest and lowest class intervals= upper and lower limits of distribution
 Histogram: graph with vertical lines drawn at the true limits of each test score (or class interval)
forming TOUCHING rectangles- midpoint in center of bar
 Bar Graph: rectangles DON’T touch
 Frequency Polygon: data illustrated with continuous line connecting the points where test scores
or class intervals meet frequencies
 A single test score means more if one relates it to other test scores
 A distribution of scores summarizes the scores for a group of individuals
 Frequency distribution: displays scores on a variable or a measure to reflect how frequently each
value was obtained
o One defines all the possible scores and determines how many people obtained each of
those scores
 Income is an example of a variable that has a positive skew
 Whenever you draw a frequency distribution or a frequency polygon, you must decide on the
width of the class interval
 Class interval: for inches of rainfall is the unit on the horizontal axis
Measures of Central Tendency
 Measure of central tendency: statistic that indicates the average or midmost score between the extreme scores in a
distribution.
 The Arithmetic Mean
o “X bar”
o sum of observations divided by number of observations
o Sigma (X/n)
o Used for interval or ratio data when distributions are relatively normal
 The Median
o The middle score
o Used for ordinal, interval, and ratio data
o Especially useful when few scores fall at extremes
 The Mode
o Most frequently-occurring score
o Bimodal distribution- 2 scores both have highest frequency
o Only common with nominal data

Measures of Variability
 Variability: indication of how scores in a distribution are scattered or dispersed
 The Range
o Difference between the highest and lowest scores
o Quick but gross description of the spread of scores
 The interquartile and semi-interquartile range
o Distribution is split up by 3 quartiles, thus making 4 quarters each representing 25% of the scores
o Q2= median
o Interquartile range measure of variability equal to the difference between Q3 and Q1
o Semi-interquartile range interquartile range divided by 2
 Quartiles and Deciles
o Quartiles are points that divide the frequency distribution into equal fourths
o First quartile is the 25th percentile; second quartile is the median, or 50th percentile; third quartile is the
75th percentile
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o The interquartile range is bounded by the range of scores that represents the middle 50% of the distribution
o Deciles are similar but use points that mark 10% rather than 25% intervals
o Stanine system: converts any set of scores into a transformed scale, which ranges from 1 to 9
 The average deviation
o X-mean=x
o Average deviation= (sum of all deviation scores)/ total number of scores
o Tells us on average how far scores are from the mean
 The Standard Deviation
o Similar to average deviation
o But in order to overcome the (+/-) problem, each deviation is squared
o Standard deviation: a measure of variability equal to the square root of the average
squared deviations about the mean o Is square root of variance
o Variance: the mean of the squares of the difference b/w the scores in a distribution and
their mean
o Found by squaring and summing all the deviation scores and then dividing by the total
number of scores o s = sample standard deviation
o o sigma = population standard deviation

Skewness
 skewness: nature and extent to which symmetry is absent
 POSITIVE SKEW Ex.) test was too hard
 NEGATIVELY SKEWED ex.) test was too easy
 can be gauges by examining relative distances of quartiles from the
 median

Kurtosis
 steepness of distribution
 platykurtic: relatively flat
 leptokurtic: relatively peaked
 mesokurtic: somewhere in the middle

The Normal Curve

Normal curve: bell-shaped, smooth, mathematically defined curve, highest at centre; both sides taper
as it approaches the x-axis asymptotically -symmetrical, and thus have mean, median, mode, is same

Area under the Normal Curve

Tails and body

Standard Scores
Standard Score: raw score that has been converted from one scale to another scale, where the latter
has arbitrarily set mean and standard deviation -used for comparison

Z-score
 Conversion of a raw score into a number indicating how many standard deviation units the raw
score is below or above the mean of the distribution.
 The difference between a particular raw score and the mean divided by the standard deviation
 Used to compare test scores with difference scales

T-score
CHAPTER 3: A STATISTICS REFRESHER
 Standard score system composed of a scale that ranges from 5 standard deviations below the
mean to 5 standard deviations above the mean
 No negatives

Other Standard Scores

 SAT
 GRE
 Linear transformation: when a standard score retains a direct numerical relationship to the original
raw score
 Nonlinear transformation: required when data are not normally distributed, yet comparisons with
normal distributions need to be made
o Normalized Standard Scores
 When scores don’t fall on normal distribution
 “normalizing a distribution involves ‘stretching’ he skewed curve into the shape
of a normal curve and creating a corresponding scale of standard scores, a
scale called a normalized standard score scale