Answer to Question #284818 in Statistics and Probability for Loco Kilo

Question

Compare and contrast Descriptive and Inferential Statistics both in concept and in applicability.

1. Allie is conducting a research on personality traits and substance use among Filipino young adults. For his sample, he chose 50 of his friends to be his respondents. Did he commit an error in choosing his sample? Why or why not?

2. Remy wants to know more about the life satisfaction and academic performance of SLU students. For his sample, he chose 100 students from each school to be his respondents. Did he commit an error in choosing his sample? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Descriptive Statistics describe a sample,there is no uncertainty because you are describing only the people and items that you actually measure.In descriptive statistics the tools used are ; Central tendency uses mean and median to locate the center of data set,this measure tells you where most values fall.

Dispersion uses the range and standard deviation to measure how far the data are ,a low dispersion indicates that the values cluster more tightly around the center while a high dispersion signifies that the data points fall further away from center.

Skewness is used to measure whether the distribution of values is symmetric or skewed.

Inferential statistics involve the use of data that is sample to inference about a larger population from which samples are drawn ,the main goal is to draw conclusion from sample and generalize them to population.The best method of sampling is using random sampling so as to allow us to have confidence that the sample represent the population,also the sample should be large enough to provide sufficient data from the drawn sample.

1.There is an error in method of getting the sample because the friends he chose as a sample is a group as with similar characteristics hence it will be giving an inconvenient information about the general population.

2.There is no error in the method of getting sample since each school is well represented with n= 100 in each school giving a good sample size that will provide the required information to represent the entire population in SLU.