In order to demonstrate statistical inference, we are going to take a brief, anonymous survey as a class.
Click here to take the survey!
Click here to take the survey!
| in-class_survey.xls |
Sociology 211, Elementary Social Statistics
0 Comments
Today, we reviewed the first quarter test. The answer for question #1 was incorrectly specified, so I will go back and change people's grades to reflect that. Sorry for the error.
Today, we talked about ways to think about the entire distribution of a variable. We created frequency tables -- both on data that students found on the internet, and on income data as a class. The PivotTable feature in Excel makes it easy to group cases together into intervals. After creating the PivotTable, one just right-clicks on the numbers, selects the "Group" option and then decides the size of the intervals with which to group the data. We created histograms, which are simply bar charts based on frequency distributions. A histogram can tell you the shape of the distribution. Distributions can be symmetrical or skewed. When the tail on the right side tail of the distribution is longer than the left side tail, then we say the distribution is skewed to the right. When the left-hand tail is longer than the right-hand tail, then we say that the distribution is skewed to the left. An example of a distribution skewed to the right is income in the US (and just about everywhere.) There are a small group of people making a lot of money, which pulls the tail of the income distribution out to the right. This rightward skew causes mean (average) income to be higher than median income. Recall that extreme values (called outliers) affect the mean but do not affect the median. The homework for Tuesday is posted on the homework part of the website. First, make sure that you have all of the in-class assignments and homeworks saved on your USB drive. Next class, as you are doing the in-class activity, learning more about Excel, I will come around the room and check assignments.
For your homework, click the homework link on the left for instructions. | Jacob Felson, PhD
Jacob Felson received his doctorate in sociology from Penn State University in December, 2009. He received a master's in sociology from Penn State in 2004, and a bachelor's degree, also in sociology, from the University of Chicago in 2002 ArchivesDecember 2010 Categories |
RSS Feed