Descriptive and Inferential Statistics Paper
Statistics are used for descriptive purposes, and can be helpful in understanding a large amount of information, such as crime rates. Using statistics to record and analyze information, helps to solve problems, back up the solution to the problems, and eliminate some of the guess work. In Psychology there has to be a variable or variables to be organized, measured, and expressed as quantities. Information is usually in the form of a frequency table, histogram, or bar graph to show the increase or decline in occurrences over a period of time. Psychological statistics is used to keep track of behavioral reactions to certain stimuli, and since…show more content… Inferential statistics are used to describe assumptions about a population from a model. Inferential statistics also uses two main methods, which are estimation, and hypothesis testing. With the estimation method, the example is used to estimate a parameter and a confidence interval about the estimate is built (RVLS, 2009). Then to make assumptions inferential statistics is utilized from data to more universal circumstances and descriptive statistics is used to explain what exactly is going on with the data.
Psychological Examples
The statistical information that psychologists use is received from testing. Descriptive statistics give a big picture of scores in any given group, measurements of central tendency and measurements of variability’s. Central tendency is the different kinds of averages (mean, median, and mode), and the variability is the standard deviation that tells how far off the average a score is. Descriptive statistics is actually the simplest of ways to look at raw data. A test that is commonly used by psychologist is the T-test and Analysis of Variance. The results of these two tests help assess the differences in averages among groups.
Conclusion
Statistics is basically the backbone of decision making. Statistics breaks information down into comparable, explainable, and easy to read data. Statistics also aids in the decision-making process.
