Survey research and design in psychology/Lectures/Descriptives & graphing

Lecture 03: Descriptives & graphing

Resource type: this resource contains a lecture or lecture notes.

This is the third lecture for the Survey research and design in psychology unit of study.

Outline

Overviews descriptive statistics and graphical approaches to analysis of univariate data.

1. Getting to know a data-set
2. Parametric & non-parametric statistics & level of measurement
3. Univariate descriptive statistics
4. Univariate graphs
5. Properties of the normal distribution
6. Non-normal distributions

Readings

1. Howitt and Cramer (2011a):
   1. Chapter 01 - Why you need statistics: Types of data (pp. 1-10)
   2. Chapter 02 - Describing variables: Tables and diagrams (pp. 11-22)
   3. Chapter 03 - Describing variables numerically: Averages, variation and spread (pp. 23-35)
   4. Chapter 04 - Shapes of distributions of scores (pp. 36-45)
   5. Chapter 05 - Standard deviation and z-scores: The standard unit of measurement in statistics (pp. 46-58)
2. Howitt and Cramer (2014a):
   1. Chapter 01 - Why statistics? (pp. 1-16)
   2. Chapter 02 - Some basics: Variability and measurement (pp. 19-28)
   3. Chapter 03 - Describing variables: Tables and diagrams (pp. 29-43)
   4. Chapter 04 - Describing variables numerically: Averages, variation and spread (pp. 44-57)
   5. Chapter 05 - Shapes of distributions of scores (pp. 58-70)
   6. Chapter 06 - Standard deviation and z-scores: The standard unit of measurement in statistics (pp. 71-85)

Videos

1. Video: Science is beautiful - explores 3 different visualisations, Florence Nightingale (health), genome overlaps, ocean currents (Nature Video, Youtube, 5:30 mins).
2. Video: Is Pivot a turning point for the web? - demonstrates the potential for dynamic data visualisation in order to discover patterns and links (Gary Flake, TED talk - 6:25 mins).

Slides

• Lecture slides (Google Slides)
• 2018 handouts:
  • Download 6 slides to a page:
  • Download 3 slides to a page:

See also

• Survey design (Previous lecture)
• Correlation (Next lecture)
• Level of measurement
• Descriptive statistics
• Graphing
• Normal distribution
• Summary of univariate descriptive statistics and graphs for the four levels of measurement (pdf)

External links

Practice quizzes

• Describing variables:Tables and diagrams quiz (Practice) (Howitt & Cramer, 2014)
• Describing variables numerically: Averages, variation and spread quiz (Practice) (Howitt & Cramer, 2014)
• Shapes and distributions of scores quiz (Practice) (Howitt & Cramer, 2014)

Other

• A periodic table of visualisation methods
• Gallery of data visualization
• Misleading visualisations (avoinelama.fi)
• Pitfalls of data analysis
• Presenting data – Statistics glossary v1.1
• Tufte's lie factor (infovis-wiki.net)
• Univariate Data analysis – The best & worst of statistical graphs