QNT 351 week 1 paper
Statistics in Business
QNT/351
Statistics in business
The purpose of this essay is to examine the purpose of statistics in business. Our text, Lind (2011) defines statistics as “The science of collecting, organizing, presenting, analyzing, and interpreting data to assist in making more effective decisions” (p.5).
Types and levels of statistics
There are two major types of statistics, descriptive and inferential. Descriptive statistics is defined by Lind (2011) as “methods of organizing, summarizing, and presenting data in an informative way” (p.6). An example of descriptive statistics would be a high school report showing that it had 300 graduates in 1990 and 450 graduates on 1991. The information that they provided described the amount of graduates that they had for each year. Inferential statistics is defined by Lind (2011) as “the methods used to estimate a property of a population on the basis of a sample” (p.7). If the same high school sent out a report showing the graduate numbers for 1999- the present to estimate the number of graduates that they would have for this school year, those statistics would be inferential because they are used to estimate future outcomes.
There are four levels of statistical data: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. The nominal level deals with qualitative variables such as colors and blood types that can only be counted and classified. Ordinal data measurement is a variable rating system that ranks data according to predetermined categories that have only relative values such as poor, average, and good. Data can be ranked and ordered using this method. Interval data measurement adds to the ordered level by adding the characteristic of a consistently measured differential. A thermometer is an interval measurement tool. Differences in degrees of temperature are consistent between the level intervals. The last level of statistics is ratio-level data; this is used for quantitative data recording. It builds upon the interval
QNT/351
Statistics in business
The purpose of this essay is to examine the purpose of statistics in business. Our text, Lind (2011) defines statistics as “The science of collecting, organizing, presenting, analyzing, and interpreting data to assist in making more effective decisions” (p.5).
Types and levels of statistics
There are two major types of statistics, descriptive and inferential. Descriptive statistics is defined by Lind (2011) as “methods of organizing, summarizing, and presenting data in an informative way” (p.6). An example of descriptive statistics would be a high school report showing that it had 300 graduates in 1990 and 450 graduates on 1991. The information that they provided described the amount of graduates that they had for each year. Inferential statistics is defined by Lind (2011) as “the methods used to estimate a property of a population on the basis of a sample” (p.7). If the same high school sent out a report showing the graduate numbers for 1999- the present to estimate the number of graduates that they would have for this school year, those statistics would be inferential because they are used to estimate future outcomes.
There are four levels of statistical data: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. The nominal level deals with qualitative variables such as colors and blood types that can only be counted and classified. Ordinal data measurement is a variable rating system that ranks data according to predetermined categories that have only relative values such as poor, average, and good. Data can be ranked and ordered using this method. Interval data measurement adds to the ordered level by adding the characteristic of a consistently measured differential. A thermometer is an interval measurement tool. Differences in degrees of temperature are consistent between the level intervals. The last level of statistics is ratio-level data; this is used for quantitative data recording. It builds upon the interval
References: Lind, D., Marchal, W., & Wathen, S. (2011). Basic statistics for business and economics (7th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.