PSYCH 3990

Descriptive Statistics
o Consolidates many numbers into a few numbers
that helps us describe a population
Two categories
o Measures of central tendency-commonly called the
average
Mean, median and mode
Mean is most common measure of central
tendency
Mu=Sigma x X/N
Mean has symbol of mu (lowercase u)
Mean is balance point of a distribution-precise
middle ground-actual precise value of every
number contributes equally
Each X value has a deviation score where the
sum of the deviation scores is equal to zero
(not to be confused with standard deviation)
Can use mean to represent groups
Weighted mean: (20.71 x 7) + (20 x 4) / (7+4)
Another measure of central tendency is the
median
Single score that has half of scores on either
side of it
Mode is most frequent number in the
distribution
Mode is highest point in distribution frequency
Least effected by outliers

 In normal distributions, mode=mean=median

In skewed distrib, outliers pulls mean away
from mode
Median also gets pulled from outliers but not as
much as mean
Mean accounts for literal numerical value of
every score in distribution
Median also useful when we have skewed
distributions b/c cuts bias introduced by
outliers in half
o Measures of variability
Instead of collecting many numbers into one, it
uses one number to represent how spread out
a distribution is
How different scores are from each other
Range, variance, and standard deviation
Range is highest score minus lowest score
Incredibly sensitive to outliers
Variance is sigma squared while standard
deviation is sigma
Variance represents the average squared
distance of scores from the mean-on average
the squared distance of scores from the mean
Variance=Sigma (X-mu)^2/N
Sigma (X-mu)^2 is called the sum of squares
Standard deviation is square root of the
variance-average distance of scores from the
mean

 When a standard deviation is small, it means

that the scores are more similar to each otherthe mean is a better representative of the
numbers-more likely scores are to be similar to
the mean
When standard devation is big, mean is still
best representative of distribution but numbers
are more spread apart
Measures of Relative Standing
o Allow us to see your score in comparison to others
in distribution
o Thinking about location of score in distribution- is it
a high score or a low score?
o Z-score-instead of being a raw score, is the number
of standard deviations that a raw score falls above
or below the mean
o Z=(x-mu)/sigma (standard deviation)
o Z(sigma) + mu =X
o If a z score is negative, the raw score is below the
mean
o Can change every single raw score into a Z-score to
create a z-score distribution
o Will talk and test a lot about characteristics of
distributions
o Z-score distributions always have a mean of zero
(mean)
o Every z-score distribution has a standard deviation
of one (standard deviation)
o Shape of z score distribution same as raw score
distribution (shape)

o Z score distributions taking all the scores on some

metric and plot them in terms of standard deviation.
Nothing about relative position or frequency of
scores is changing. Just number used to represent it
is changing
o Why would we use z-scores? It allows us to compare
different things to each other. i.e. ACT and SAT
scores
o Allows us to take distributions that are different
from each other and compare your places in the
distributions
Normal Distributions
o Have had raw score (mean of mu and std of sigma)
and z score distributions (mean of 0 and std of 1)
o Very easily confused with z score distributions
o Point is to understand what percentage of scores fall
at or above a certain point
o Always symmetrical, unimodal, and bell shaped
o Raw score and z score distribution are empirical
(based on data)
o Normal distribution is theoretical and based on
math
o The tails never touch zero (every single case is
possible)-thats why a value will never have a
probability of zero
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