DON HONORIO VENTURA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SOCIAL

SCIENCES
Cabambangan, Villa de Bacolor 2001, Pampanga, Philippines
Tel. No. (6345) 458 0021; Fax (6345) 458 0021 Local 211 AND PHILOSOPHY
ISO 9001: 2015 DHVSU Main Campus, Villa de Bacolor, Pampanga
URL: http://dhvsu.edu.ph E-Mail Address: @gmail com
QMS-Certified

Module 1: PSYCHOLOGICAL STATISTICS

Description
This module explores and appreciate the diffrerent the key concepts, vocabulary, and techniques of the
use in behavioral statistics.
After completing the module, the students are expected to:
1. Define and understand the different key concepts, vocabulary, and techniques of the use in behavioural
statistics

2. Appreciate the important terms and key concepsts in statistics.

Learning Contents:
A. 1 INTRODUCTION

Methods of Knowing

a. Authority - Something is considered true because of tradition or because some person of

distinction says it is true.
b. Rationalism - Uses reasoning alone to arrive at knowledge.
c. Intuition - Sudden insight, the clarifying idea that springs into consciousness all at once as a
whole.
d. Scientific Method - Although the scientific method uses both reasoning and intuition for
establishing truth, its reliance on objective assessment is what differentiates this method from the
others.

Important Key concepts/Terms

 Population - A population is the complete set of individuals, objects, or scores that the investigator is
interested in studying.
 Sample - A sample is a subset of the population
 Variable - A variable is any property or characteristic of some event, object, or person that may have
different values at different times depending on the conditions.
o Independent variable (IV) - The independent variable in an experiment is the variable that is
systematically manipulated by the investigator
o Dependent variable (DV) - The dependent variable in an experiment is the variable that the
investigator measures to determine the effect of the independent variable
 Data - The measurements that are made on the subjects of an experiment are called data
 Statistic - A statistic is a number calculated on sample data that quantifies a characteristic of the sample.

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 DON HONORIO VENTURA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SOCIAL
SCIENCES
Cabambangan, Villa de Bacolor 2001, Pampanga, Philippines
Tel. No. (6345) 458 0021; Fax (6345) 458 0021 Local 211 AND PHILOSOPHY
ISO 9001: 2015 DHVSU Main Campus, Villa de Bacolor, Pampanga
URL: http://dhvsu.edu.ph E-Mail Address: @gmail com
QMS-Certified

 Parameter - A parameter is a number calculated on population data that quantifies a

characteristic of the population

Scientific Research and Statistics

1. OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES - no variables are actively manipulated by the investigator, and hence
observational studies cannot determine causality.
TYPES OF OBSERVATIONAL STUDIES

a. Naturalistic observation
 A major goal is to obtain an accurate description of the situation being studied. Much
anthropological and etiological research is of this type.
b. Parameter estimation
 conducted on samples to estimate the level of one or more population characteristics (e.g., the
population average or percentage). Surveys, public opinion polls, and much market research fall
into this category
c. Correlational studies
 the investigator focuses attention on two or more variables to determine whether they are related.
d. Random Sampling – allows the laws of probability.
2. TRUE EXPERIMENTS - an attempt is made to determine whether changes in one variable cause changes
in another variable. In a true experiment, an independent variable is manipulated and its effect on some
dependent variable is studied.
Descriptive and Inferential Statistics

1. Descriptive Statistics - Sets of techniques for reduction of quantitative data to a small number of more
convenient and easily communicated descriptive ways.
2. Inferential Statistics - Decision-making techniques that aid researchers in drawing inferences from
samples to populations and in testing hypothesis regarding the nature of social reality.
Descriptive Statistics (Measurement Scales)

1. Nominal Scale
 are not really scales at all; they do not scale items along any dimension, but rather label them.
 Simplest form of measurement
 Classification and categorization
 Mutually exclusive – 1 category
 Exhaustive – covers every case
 Relatively homogenous – truly comparable
 EQUIVALENCE – all members of a given class are the same from the standpoint of the
classification variable.
2. Ordinal Scale
 Simplest true scale
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 DON HONORIO VENTURA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SOCIAL
SCIENCES
Cabambangan, Villa de Bacolor 2001, Pampanga, Philippines
Tel. No. (6345) 458 0021; Fax (6345) 458 0021 Local 211 AND PHILOSOPHY
ISO 9001: 2015 DHVSU Main Campus, Villa de Bacolor, Pampanga
URL: http://dhvsu.edu.ph E-Mail Address: @gmail com
QMS-Certified

 Orders people, objects, or events along some continuum.

Example

 Ranking of school students – 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.

 Ratings in restaurants
 Evaluating the frequency of occurrences

 Very often
 Often
 Not often
 Not at all
 Assessing the degree of agreement
 Totally agree
 Agree
 Neutral
 Disagree
 Totally disagree

3. Interval Scale
 Assigns score.
 Tells us about the ordering of categories but indicates the exact distance between them.
 Constant unit of measurement yields equal intervals between points on the scale.
4. Ratio Scale
 TRUE ZERO POINT
 is the point corresponding to the absence of the thing being measured.
Using Computer in Statistic

 Statistical Package for The Social Sciences (SPSS)

o Was first launched in 1968. Since SPSS was acquired by IBM in 2009, it's officially known as
IBM SPSS Statistics but most users still just refer to it as “SPSS”.
o SPSS is software for editing and analyzing all sorts of data. These data may come from basically
any source: scientific research, a customer database, Google Analytics or even the server log
files of a website. SPSS can open all file formats that are commonly used for structured data such
as
 spreadsheets from MS Excel or OpenOffice;
 plain text files (.txt or .csv);
 relational (SQL) databases;
 Stata and SAS.
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