Psychology2016

Statistics in Psychology A-13

Table A.4 Drawing and Writing Ability Test Scores

Drawing (X) Writing (Y)

Student 1 3 5

Student 2 1 2

Student 3 2 3

Student 4 4 4

Student 5 1 3

Student 6 4 6

Student 7 2 3

Student 8 3 4

Student 9 5 5

Student 10 1 2

Practice Quiz How much do you remember?

Pick the best answer.

1. ____ statistics consist of techniques that allow researchers
   to determine the difference between results of a study that are
   meaningful and those that are merely due to chance variations.
   a. Inferential
   b. Parametric
   c. Predictive
   d. Descriptive


2. Andrew is conducting a test in which he has three different
   participant groups, and he wants to analyze the variance
   among the three groups. In other words, he wants to know
   whether the means of each group are significantly different
   from each other. Which of the following would he want to
   calculate?
   a. A z-test
   b. A t-test
   c. An F-test
   d. A chi-square test
   3. Bailey is conducting a correlational study that examines the
   frequency with which it rains in her town and the atmospheric
   pressure at noon on each day. When she is done, she calculates a
   correlation coefficient that will summarize the relationship between
   these two variables. This coefficient is going to be summarized by
   the lowercase letter ____.
   a. c
   b. r
   c. p
   d. e
   4. If a researcher wants to demonstrate that their findings depict a
   significant difference between participant groups, which of the
   following statistical statements would need to be made?
   a. p ≤ 0.05
   b. r = ±1.00
   c. t ≥ 2.50
   d. z ≤ 100

Chapter Summary

What Are Statistics?

A.1 Explain why statistics are important to

psychologists and psychology majors.

• Statistics is a branch of mathematics that involves the collection,
  description, and interpretation of numerical data.


• Students who understand the process of research and the sta-
  tistical methods used in research are more desirable to many
  university and business institutions than those who lack such
  skills.

Descriptive Statistics

• Descriptive statistics are ways of organizing numbers and sum-
  marizing them so that they can be understood.

A.2 Describe the types of tables and graphs that

represent patterns in data.

• Frequency distributions are tables or graphs that show the pat-
  terns in a set of scores and can be a table, a bar graph or histo-
  gram, or a line graph or polygon.


• The normal curve is a special frequency polygon that is symmet-
  rical and has the mean, median, and mode as the highest point
  on the curve.
  A.3 Identify three measures of central tendency and
  explain how they are impacted by the shape of the
  distribution.


• Measures of central tendency are ways of finding numbers
  that best represent the center of a distribution of numbers and
  include the mean, median, and mode.

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