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ObjectiveConcepts What to knowLimitations
Importance of Statistics
in Social Sciences.
First concepts
Facultad de Comercio, Turismo y Ciencias Sociales Jovellanos
Statistics in Social Sciences
ObjectiveConcepts What to knowLimitations
Objective of Statistics
First concepts
Limitations of Statistics
What do you have to know?
Statistics in Social Sciences
Objective LimitationsConcepts What to know
Getting information from customers: zip code
Your zip code, Why does she need it? please? Why do stores ask for a Zip code? Do they want to know where do we live? What informa- tion do they really want to get? For what?
Statistics in Social Sciences
Objective LimitationsConcepts What to know
Getting information from customers: fidelity cards
I (^) “Fidelity cards” or “loyalty cards” are issued by a business to customers or clients and they reward them for regular patronage with special benefits such as discounts and free gifts. I (^) Clients provide some personal information (age, address or birth date of the customer’s children...), information about how the client has known about them, etc. I (^) Why do you think they offer us those cards? Do they get some additional information about customers? How do they use such information?
Statistics in Social Sciences
ObjectiveConcepts What to knowLimitations
Objective of Statistics
I (^) Objective: “to make an inference about a certain characteristic of the individuals in a population, based on information contained in a sample, and to quantify the goodness of the inference”. I (^) Example: The marketers of a business want to know the average age of their regular customers, to properly target advertising. I (^) Population: Regular customers of the business. I (^) Sample: owners of fidelity cards. I (^) Characteristic (or “statistical variable”): age. I (^) The larger the size of the sample, the more precise information they get.
Statistics in Social Sciences
ObjectiveConcepts What to knowLimitations
First concepts
I (^) Population.- A collection of units being studied. Units can be people, places, objects, procedures, or many other things. (Each unit is a member of the population.) I (^) Sample.- A collection of units picked from a population. I (^) Sample size.- The number of units in the sample. Usually denoted n. I (^) Data.- Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis. Sample information. I (^) Variable.- A quantity which may take any one of a specified set of values. The opposite of a constant. I (^) Statistical variable.- A characteristic of a unit (individual) being observed that may vary from individual to individual (e.g. income, age, weight, sex, etc.) Statistics in Social Sciences
Objective LimitationsConcepts What to know
Different types of statistical variables
I (^) Categorical variable.- A variable whose values range over categories, such as color, gender, or type of accommodation, for instance. I (^) (Categorical) ordinal variable.- A categorical variable whose possible values have a natural order, such as small, medium, large or cold, warm, hot. I (^) Quantitative variable.- A variable that takes numerical values for which arithmetic makes sense, for example, counts, temperatures, weights, amounts of money, etc.
Statistics in Social Sciences
Objective LimitationsConcepts What to know
Limitations of Statistics
POPULATION SAMPLE
(1) How to select individuals from the population in order to take a representative sample. (2) How to quantify the goodness of our inferences about the population, (inferences based on the information provided by the sample).
(1)
(2)
SAMPLE TECHNIQUES
INFERENTIAL STATISTICS
I (^) (1) and (2) are out of the scope of the course. I (^) We will start from a selected sample of individuals, and we will summarize the information, without making any inference about the whole population.
Statistics in Social Sciences
