This page provides survey data on the sexual activity of male and female subjects and discusses choosing appropriate statistics to describe the data as well as reporting bias. It also links to a Chance article about the same study.
The activity is designed to help students develop a better intuitive understanding of what is meant by variability in statistics. Emphasis is placed on the standard deviation as a measure of variability. As they learn about the standard deviation, many students focus on the variability of bar heights in a histogram when asked to compare the variability of two distributions. For these students, variability refers to the "variation" in bar heights. Other students may focus only on the range of values, or the number of bars in a histogram, and conclude that two distributions are identical in variability even when it is clearly not the case. This activity can help students discover that the standard deviation is a measure of the density of values about the mean of a distribution and to become more aware of how clusters, gaps, and extreme values affect the standard deviation. Key words: Variability, standard deviation
SalStat is an small application for the statistical analysis of scientific data (with a special concentration on psychology). It can already do 18 kinds of descriptive statistics, t tests (paired, unpaired and one sample), 3 kinds of correlations linear regression and point biserial tests, and single factor ANOVA (both within and between subjects). Data are entered on an easy-to-use datagrid like a spreadsheet, and all the analyses are driven by menus and dialog boxes. Output can be formatted to HTML.