ABSTRACT
The quantitative approach is primarily concerned with quantifying the relationship among variables and testing hypotheses generated by theories. Sociologists argue that human behavior is embedded in culture – the cultural beliefs and expectations of a society – which are important determinants of how people behave. Defining random variables in this way opens up the possibility of applying a whole host of tools and concepts for analysis. A histogram displays the frequency with which a variable takes on values at different intervals. One extremely important measure of central tendency is the sample mean, which simply adds up all the values that a random variable takes in a data sample and divides by the number of observations on that random variable. Statistical analysis typically involves collecting data from a sample drawn from an unobserved population in order to come up with an estimate of some unknown characteristic of that population.
