CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

Based upon their reading of Chapter 15, students should be able to:

1. understand the role of descriptive and inferential statistics in social science research.
2. explain the concept of a frequency distribution and describe its characteristics.
3. use graphs (pie charts, bar charts, and histograms) to describe distributions.
4. understand and calculate the three measures of central tendency: mode, median, and mean.
5. calculate and interpret the measures of dispersion discussed in this chapter: qualitative variation, range, mean deviation, variance, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation.
6. describe the different types of frequency distributions and the concepts related to them.
7. calculate standard scores and employ them in reference to the normal curve.