A Quantitative Foundations

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[q] Degree of precision used in the operationalization of a variable; most common in political science are interval-ratio, ordinal, and nominal

[a] level of measurement

[q] Level of measurement: continuous or discrete quantities with consistent units attached such as years or votes; most precise level used in political science

[a] interval-ratio

[q] Level of measurement: rankable categories, where the intervals between categories may or may not be equal or precisely definable; intermediate level of measurement

[a] ordinal

[q] Level of measurement: unrankable but discrete categories, with no implied direction or magnitude; lowest precision of measurement

[a] nominal

[q] Summarize and describe characteristics of data (mean, median, mode, standard deviation, etc.) without reference or generalization beyond the available data itself

[a] descriptive statistics

[q] Branch of statistics that generalizes from samples to populations

[a] inferential statistics

[q] Characteristic of continuous distributions; concerned with distance between mean and median values

[a] skew

[q] In quantitative analysis, name of the column in your dataset; shortest and most abbreviated representation of the data contents

[a] variable

[q] In the statistical sense, an indication that the observed relationship is not 0

[a] significance

[q] sample selection procedure: Equal Probability of Selection Mechanism

[a] EPSEM

[q] Row and column at the edges (margins) of a table indicating total for that row or column; must balance across and down

[a] marginals

[q] Arithmetic average; measure of central tendency for interval-ratio variables

[a] mean

[q] Value above and below which 50% of the values in a distribution lie; measure of central tendency for ordinal variables

[a] median

[q] Value that occurs the most frequently in a distribution; measure of central tendency for nominal variables

[a] mode

[q] Classic bell-shaped distribution for continuous variables; has special known properties for probability under the curve, sampling distribution of mean, and more

[a] normal distribution

[q] Measure of dispersion for ordinal variables

[a] range

[q] Measure of dispersion for interval-ratio variables

[a] standard deviation

[q] The trailing ends of a distribution, at the extremes away from the central tendency

[a] tails

[q] Distribution for discrete data where each value is equally probable

[a] binomial distribution

[q] Family of statistics, like descriptive statistics, calculated on a single variable

[a] univariate

[q] Calculated as the number of standard deviations from the mean

[a] Z score

[q] A value minus the mean of that variable

[a] deviation

[q] Distribution of some statistic, such as a mean, calculated on repeated samples from a population; some have special properties

[a] sampling distribution

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