Homework: Week 7, Chapter 7 - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages If I were an editor of a newspaper reporting the results, I would seek to determine the validity of the result before printing the story. I would ask the reporter the following questions. What was your sampling criterion? What was your opinion on the issue prior to the research? What was your source of data?
Descriptive statistics demonstrates characteristics of sets of data. The statistics are divided into measures of central tendencies and measures of dispersion. While the measures of central tendencies include mean, mode, and median, measures of dispersion are majorly expressed through either variance or standard deviation (Triola, 2011).
Manual computation of these quantities, whether as statistics or as parameters, has a lot of challenges such as computational errors, especially if large sets of data are involved. Application of statistical software has, however, made the computations easy through designed programs. Descriptive statistics are applicable in many real life fields. An academic institution may, for example, use the statistics to understand the performance of students in a class for evaluation. Similarly, descriptive statistics such as the mean can be used to compare two sets of data. The same applications can be adopted in industrial setups for evaluating processes and comparing either time series periodic performance of an item or the performance between two subjects over a period (Triola, ...Download file to see next pagesRead More