Week 1

Information collected in narrative form.

Information collected in numeric form.

Variable hypothesized cause of or influence on the dependent variable.

Variable hypothesized to depend on or be caused by another variable; the outcome of interest.

Having a finite number of values between any two points.

Able to take on an infinite (in theory) range of values between two points on a continuum.

The assignment of numbers to objects to designate the quantity of an attribute, according to specified rules.

Lowest level of measurement; involving the assignment of characteristics into categories with no particular order.

Level of measurement that yields a rank ordering of a variable along a specified dimension.

Level of measurement that involves assigning numbers to indicate both the ordering on an attribute and the distance between different amounts of the attribute.

Level of measurement of attributes in which there are equal distances between score units and a true meaningful zero point.

Collective term for interval or ratio data.

Statistics used to describe and summarize data.

Statisticsthat rely on the laws of probability to help researchers draw conclusions about sample characteristics in terms of their relationship to populations.

The entire set of individuals having some characteristic.

A subset of a population selected for study.

Systematic array of data values together with a count of the number of times each value was obtained.

The count of the number of cases with a given score value.

A grouping of continuous variable data such that is can be displayed in a grouped frequency distribution.

A graphical display of a frequency distribution, generally for a
categorical variable.

A graphical display showing a relative frequency distribution in a circle.

A graphical display of a frequency distribution in which dots connected by a straight line indicate the number of times a score value occurs.

Characteristic
of a frequency distribution describing the number of peaks.

Having one peak.

A distribution with two sides that are mirror images; a non-skewed
distribution.

A distribution that is asymmetric.

A distribution with a pointed, thin peak.

A distribution with a low, wide-spread peak.

Theoretical distribution that is symmetrical, unimodal, not too peaked, nor too flat.

Indexes that come from the center of a distribution, describing a “typical” value.

The score or value that occurs most frequently in a distribution.

The exact middle score in a distribution; the score above and below which 50% of the scores lie.

The arithmetic average of a distribution, calculated by summing all scores and dividing by the number of scores.

The difference between the highest and lowest value in a distribution.

A descriptive statistic for measuring the degree of variability in a set
of score

A measure of dispersion of a distribution; equal to the standard deviation squared.

Scores or values expressed in terms of standard deviations away from the mean.

Standard scores when the distribution is normal.

Two-dimensional table that displays a crosstabulation of two categorical variables.

Two-dimensional table that displays a crosstabulation of two categorical variables.

A relationship between two continuous variables such that, when plotted in a scatterplot, a straight line is formed.

A graph depicting the relationship between two continuous variables.

An index that summarizes the magnitude and direction of the relationship between two variables.

A relationship in which high values of one variable are associated with high values in another variable.

A relationship in which high values of one variable are associated with low values in another variable.

Designates the magnitude and direction of the relationship between two measured on at least the interval level.