ABSTRACT
This book deals with statistical analysis, which involves both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. The major concern of descriptive statistics is to present information in a convenient, usable, and understandable form. For example, once the data have been collected, some of the first things that a researcher would want to do is calculate their frequency, graph them, calculate the measures of central tendency (means, medians, modes), calculate the dispersion of the scores (variances, standard deviations), and identify outliers in the distribution of the scores. These procedures are called descriptive statistics because they are aimed primarily at describing the data. Inferential statistics, on the other hand, is not concerned with just describing the obtained data. Rather, it addresses the problem of making broader generalizations or inferences from the sample data to the population. This is the more complicated part of statistical analysis, and this chapter will focus on the role that inferential statistics plays in statistical analysis.
