In the last two issues I looked at descriptive statistics in the form of central tendency and dispersion. Descriptive statistics do what they say on the tin — they describe data. Measures of central tendency show us the average, mid-point or typical scores for a data set. Measures of dispersion show us how closely clustered scores are around the central tendency.
When psychologists talk about statistics however, the chances are that they are speaking of inferential statistics. Inferential statistics allow us to look at data from a sample of participants and infer things, i.e. make judgements about the population from which the sample was drawn.
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