AP Psychology

Week 2: Sept 6, 2022

Teacher: Andrew Trigg

Topic: Statistical Reasoning

 Describing data
(descriptive stats)
 Accurate statistical understanding is important for psychological research
 Casual estimates often misread reality and misinform
 Big, round, undocumented numbers warrant caution
 Teaching statistical reasoning is needed
 Presentation of statistical information needs more transparency
 Descriptive statistics are often displayed with a histogram (bar graph)
 Measures of central tendency: a single score represents a set of scores
 Mode: Most frequently occurring score(s) in a distribution
 Mean: Arithmetic average of a distribution, obtained by adding the scores and then
dividing by the number of scores; Can be distorted by few atypical scores
 Median: Middle score in a distribution; half the scores are above it and half are below
it.
Measures of central tendency

 If the mode, mean and median are

identical, the graph will be a normal
distribution curve.
 If they’re different, the graph will
be skewed (i.e. lacking symmetry)
 The mean is the measure that is
most susceptible to extreme data
points.
 Positive skew – pulls the mean
towards the higher end.
 Negative skew – pulls the mean
towards the lower end.
 Standard deviation is a more
useful measure of variation.
A skewed distribution

This graphic representation of the distribution of a village’s incomes illustrates the

three measures of central tendency—mode, median, and mean. Note how just a few
high incomes make the mean—the fulcrum point that balances the incomes above
and below—deceptively high.
Describing variations in data

 Measures of variation reveal similarity or diversity in scores.

 Range: Difference between the highest and lowest scores in a distribution
 Standard deviation: a measure of how much scores vary around the mean.
 Normal curve (normal distribution): Symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that
describes the distribution of many types of data
 Some data, including some psychological data, follow a normal distribution, e.g.
height, weight and IQ scores (designed that way).
 For scientific research, data can still be informative if it’s skewed. However, standard
deviation should be cited in such cases, rather than the mean.
 Income levels are not normally distributed; (they follow a power-law distribution: the
Pareto distribution).
Different kinds of data
 The textbook doesn’t mention it but… the types of statistics computed for a set of data
depends on which type of data is collected:
 Nominal data – data that identifies categories, e.g. gender, yes/no answers on
surveys, class level in school (e.g. Y10, Y11 and Y12).
 Ordinal data – data that identifies the order in which a data set falls. Any ranking of
items, e.g. your academic ranking at school, is ordinal data.
 Interval data – includes data that fall within a line that has a zero point (i.e. it
terminates at zero). Weight is an example. A weight (i.e. mass) of zero means that a
thing doesn’t exist. Height is another example.
 Ratio data – includes data that fall in a number line (i.e. zero is just another number
on the line). For example, a temperature of 0° does not mean there is no temperature
(on all temp scales except Kelvin).
 In psychology, test scores are sometimes considered as ratio data because a score of zero
doesn’t usually mean an absence of knowledge….
Reliable differences (inferential
stats)
 Real data are “noisy.” The mean of one group (e.g. breast-fed babies) could differ
from the mean of another group (e.g. bottle-fed babies) simply due to random
fluctuations in the people sampled.
 Researchers need to be cautious when they interpret such results.
 When is an observed difference reliable?
 Representative samples are better than biased samples.
 Less-variable observations are more reliable than ones that are more variable.
 More cases are better than fewer.
 Generalizations based on a few unrepresentative cases are unreliable.
 The purpose of inferential statistics is to discover whether our findings can be
applied to the larger population from which the sample was collected.
Significant differences
(inferential stats)
 Statistical significance indicates the likelihood that a result will happen by chance.
 When is an observed difference significant?
 When sample averages are reliable and difference between them is relatively large,
the difference has statistical significance.
 Observed difference is probably not due to chance variation between the samples.
 In psychological research, proof beyond a reasonable doubt means that the odds of its
occurrence by chance are less than 5 percent.
 The point to remember: Statistical significance does not say anything about the
importance of the results.
 Studying psychology is often extremely hard: “If the human brain were so simple that we
could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” – quoted by Emerson W.
Pugh in The Biology of Human Values
Homework

 Revise Module 7 for your upcoming quiz

 (Optional) Read the College Board’s Curriculum Module: Teaching Statistics

and Research Methodology (uploaded to Schoology)