Scribd
Upload
6 views

Introduction

Uploaded by

Neuro Albizu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
6 views

Introduction

Uploaded by

Neuro Albizu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 11

Statistics 101 Course Notes

Introduction to Quantitative Methods for


Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences

Instructor: Alan Agresti

Course syllabus: At top of course home page, which is also at


www.stat.ufl.edu/~aa/harvard

Teaching fellows:
Roee Gutman
Jon Hennessy

TF section times on syllabus, their office hours to be listed at


course home page.
1. Introduction
• Data - Information collected to gain knowledge about a
field or to answer a question of interest.

• Data Sources include:


– Surveys (Mail, Telephone, Internet)
– Experiments
(These days, huge data sets routinely generated in other ways
in business, government, at Internet sites)

• Statistics- Set of methods for collecting/analyzing data


(the art and science of learning from data)
Statistics provides methods for:
• Design - Planning/Implementing a study
– Sample survey or experiment?
– How to choose people (subjects) for the study, and
how many?

• Description – Graphical and numerical methods


for summarizing the data

• Inference – Methods for making predictions about


a population (total set of subjects of interest),
based on a sample (subset of the sample on
which study collects data)
Examples
• How can we study whether a new therapy is better than
a standard therapy for treating depression?

• How (if at all) is happiness associated with income, job


satisfaction, family situation, social life, religious
beliefs, political ideology?

• Can we predict college GPA using IQ, average time


studying per week, high school GPA, SAT scores,
number of hours spent on social activities, … ?
• Parameter – Numerical summary of the
population
– Population mean (or median or some other measure)
– Population proportion (or percentage)

• Statistic – Numerical summary of the sample

We’ll learn how to use sample statistics to make


inferences about population parameters.
Examples: parameters / statistics
Parameter Statistic

% of all adult Americans % of 1000 adult Americans in


who approve of Barack a poll who approve of
Obama’s performance as Obama’s performance as
President President

Mean reaction time to red Mean reaction time to red light


light in experiment when for 100 students in
using (not using) cell experiment when using (not
phone while driving using) cell phone while
driving
(conceptual population)
Note:

• Populations can be actual sets of people or


conceptual (hypothetical)

• For good inferences, need sample to be


representative of population

• Statistical software (such as SPSS, Stata, SAS,


R, Minitab) is used to analyze data
Software applies to data files

• Any one row contains observations for particular


subject (person) in sample

• Any one column contains observations for a


particular characteristic (“variable”) measured.
The names of the characteristics are at top of
file, in first row.
Examples: Go to
www.stat.ufl.edu/~aa/social/data.html

The first data file, from a survey of 60 social science


graduate students at Univ. of Florida, looks like:

subject gen age high coll tv veg party ideology abor


1 m 32 2.2 3.5 3 n r 6 n
2 f 23 2.1 3.5 15 y d 2 y
3 f 27 3.3 3.0 0 y d 2 y
4 f 35 3.5 3.2 5 n i 4 y
5 M 23 3.1 3.5 6 n i 1 y
When loaded by SPSS, looks like:
Why study Statistics?
One answer: You need it to understand research findings in
psychology, medicine, business, …..

Another answer: In a competitive job market, understanding how


to deal with quantitative information provides an important
advantage.
(“The sexy job of the next 10 years will be statistician” – Hal
Varian, chief economist at Google)

Broader answer: In your everyday life, it will help you make sense
of what to heed and what to ignore in statistical information
provided in news reports, medical research, surveys, political
campaigns, advertisements, …

You might also like