Introduction

Statistics involves the collection, organization, summarization, presentation, and interpretation

of data. It has two branches: descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics
is the term given to the analysis of data that helps describe, show or summarize data in a
meaningful way. When using descriptive statistics, it is useful to summarize a group of data
using a combination of tabulated description (i.e., tables), graphical description (i.e., graphs
and charts) and statistical commentary (i.e., a discussion of the results). The branch that allows
to make predictions (“inferences”) from the data is called inferential statistics. With inferential
statistics, it takes data from samples and make generalizations about a population. For
instance, you might stand in a mall and ask a sample of 100 people if they like shopping at SM.
You could make a bar chart of yes or no answers (that would be a descriptive statistics) or you
could use your research (and inferential statistics) to reason that around 75-80% of the
population (all shoppers in all malls) like shopping at SM.
Testing the significance of the difference between two means, two standard deviations, two
proportions, or two percentages, is an important area of inferential statistics. Comparison
between two or more variables often arises in research or experiments and to be able to make
valid conclusions regarding the results of the study, one has to apply an appropriate test
statistic. This chapter deals with the discussion of the different test statistics that are commonly
used in research studies under inferential statistics.