SOCI 3307.266 Notes
Scenario #1
● If you’re Colin Allred or Ted Cruz and interested in how your campaign is doing among Texans
you want to study
➢ Texas Adults
➢ Texas Citizens
➢ Texas registered voters
➢ Texas voters who are likely to vote
● Difficulties population is always changing
➢ New people are becoming eligible and registering
History of statistics
● Early etymology: Statistics is “Science dealing with data about the condition of a state or
community”
➔ Practitioners of statistics wanted to promote a healthy state
● Development of probability theory
➔ Goal: minimization of error
➔ Want to be able to state in mathematical terms the likelihood that our calculation
procedure error
Scenario #2
● You are a member of a nonprofit group in the Austin metropolitan area dedicated to resolving
the issue of food deserts:
Definition of statics
● Statistics: A theoretically guided set of practices and procedures for collecting and
mathematically describing properties of a set of data
➢ Collection: How do we acquire the data?
➢ Organizations: How do we store the data and prepare is for analysis
➢ Analysis and interpretation: How do we make sense of the data? How do we present it to
the audience
Some Vocab
● Data
➔ Data points: discrete, individual units of factual information used for statistical analysis
➔ Dataset: complete collections of data
● Causes: The “Individual” Concepts and operationalizations
● Whenever we want to know information about the social world, we must engage in the process
of conceptualization and operationalization
-
concepts: theoretical constructs that correspond to questions we are interested in asking
Operationalizations: the process of defining a concept specifically in reference to a concrete form of data
How might we measure the concepts of…
➔ Stress?
➔ Class performance?
Contemporary use of statistics: Is religion in decline in the U.S.?
H ow can we get information about populations
● Population is the complete set of cases that meet some predefined criteria
● census: when we measure the properties of a population by acquiring data on some
circumscribed set of members
-
Statistics measurement of some property of a sample
● Samples population: Statistic parameters
-
Just as samples are intended to resemble populations, we may use statistics to
approximate parameters
Types of analysis
➢ Univariate analysis: Analysis pertaining to one variable
-
What proportion of the population is voting for Colin Allred?
➢ Bivariate analysis: Analyses pertaining to the relationship between two variables.
-
How does gender affect support for Colin Allred?
➢ Multivariate analysis: Analyses pertaining to the complex relationship between many
variables
-
How does gender affect support for Colin Allred, after we have accounted for the age
and race of the respondent?
What is the mean Sample
population
Formula
X=E
What is the Median?
❖ The median value of the central data point in a distribution after the distribution has been
ordered by value
-
The median = middle of the dataset
Formula: N+½ odd number of values
N= 15
1 3 3 5 6 6 8 12 13 16 21 22 22 22 25
Even the number of values
1 3 3 5 6 6 8 12 13 16 21 22 22 25
Mode
➢ Mode: the value in a distribution that occurs most frequently