ABSTRACT
Previously: It is time to remind ourselves very briefly where we have been and where we are going. We have been trying to come to terms with how problems can be turned into questions and how using the literature, arguments and ideas turn into theory. Using the explication process, we have seen the relationships between ideas (theory) and observations. We have seen how observations of reality can be created and how reliability and validity issues help us assess those observations. We looked at how sampling theory works and how the idea of hypothesis testing works. We’ve looked at different ways to form questions based on the literature and the problems we are trying to address. Ultimately we want to use those questions to help us collect observations, analyze the observations (data) and come to conclusions about the data that will help us answer the questions that brought us here in the first place. During our discussion of sampling theory we looked at our first statistics—univariate descriptive statistics. We talked about measures of central tendency (means, medians, modes) and measures of dispersion (range, standard deviation, variance). We have also talked about different kinds of variables (independent and dependent).
