ABSTRACT
Descriptive statistics enables the researcher to present the data in a more meaningful way and therefore allows for simpler interpretation of the data. With inferential statistics, the researcher is trying to draw conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data. When conducting research, the researcher employs inferential statistics to serve two major purposes: to infer from the sample data the attitudes/opinions of the population and hypothesis testing, that is, to aid the researcher in making a decision regarding, for example, whether an observed difference between groups (e.g., gender difference in problem-solving ability) is a meaningful/reliable difference or one that might have happened by chance alone. Probability is concerned with the possible chance outcomes of events. In calculating probabilities, that is, assigning relative frequencies to each of the possible outcomes, one can approach the calculations in two ways, the classical approach and the empirical approach.
