Almost any inferential study involves aspects of descriptive

Almost any inferential study involves aspects of descriptive statistics. Explain why.

Solution

There are two major divisions of the field of statistics. Each of these segments of statistics is important, and accomplishes different objectives. The names of these subfields are descriptive and inferential statistics.

Descriptive statistics are procedures used to summarize, organize, and make sense of a set of scores or observations. Descriptive statistics are typically presented graphically, in tabular form (in tables), or as summary statistics (single values).

Inferential statistics are procedures used that allow researchers to infer or generalize observations made with samples to the larger population from which they were selected.

For example:

All students enrolled in college would constitute the population.This is the group that researchers want to learn more about. Specifically, they want to learn more about characteristics in this population, called population parameters.The characteristics of interest are typically some descriptive statistics. For e.g taking the case of analysing the anxiety of students, the characteristic of interest is anxiety, specifically measured as the number of times students fidget during a class presentation. Unfortunately, in behavioral research, scientists rarely know what these population parameters are since they rarely have access to an entire population. They simply do not have the time, money, or other resources to even consider studying allstudents enrolled in college. The alternative is to select a portion or sample of individuals in the population. Selecting a sample is more practical, and most scientific research you read comes from samples and not populations. Going back to our example, this means that selecting a portion of students from the larger population of all students enrolled in college would constitute a sample. A characteristic that describes a sample is called a Sample statistic