75.5% of Statistics are Made Up
Ok, that is not true at all. In fact, it is old joke that has circulated for decades. Some folks do make up statistics on the spot when trying to win an argument, but we won’t worry with them. We will learn the basics of statistics covered on the high school equivalency exams.
Statistics Overview
Liesel needs to do a survey regarding how many people support funding for after-school educational programs. She chooses her hometown to do the survey. All of the residents in her hometown is called the population. It is impossible to interview the entire population so she narrows it down to a random sample of the population. She makes sure she gathers results from every area in her town so that her sample isn’t skewed by one particular demographic.
Liesel wants to make sure her sample is unbiased. An unbiased sample means that her sample will include adults of all ages with various educational backgrounds. If she chose to survey only people who held a college degree, then her survey would be biased because it could be argued that those with college degrees will skew the results favorably for additional funding.
Liesel’s survey collected a data set of $1 to $50,000 that survey participants felt should be used from the education budget to fund the after-school programs. That means her survey had a range of $49,999. Most people wanted at least $10,000 used. Only a couple of survey participants answered lower than $10,000. These two participants are known as outliers. An outlier can skew results positively or negatively. In Liesel’s case, these two participants will impact her survey negatively because they pull down the rest of the results.
There are three statistical measurements you will need to know for the exam. They are mean, median, and mode. We will continue with Liesel’s survey results over the next three pages using these three methods to report the data that Liesel gathered.