ESSENTIAL STATISTICS FOR

TESTING
B Y: S U S A N A U B I N A
 MEASUREMENT

The concept of measurement is at the heart of psychological

testing as a scientific enterprise for the study of human
behavior.
Measurement involves the use of certain devices or rules for
assigning numbers to objects or events.

Psychometrics, or psychological measurement, and is one of

the primary tools for the science and practice of psychology
 VARIABLES AND CONSTANTS

variable is anything that varies

constant is anything that does not.
 THE MEANING OF NUMBERS

1. Nominal Scales - The word nominal is derived from the Latin

root nomen, meaning name. Categorical data - which are data
related to variables such as gender, political affiliation, color
2. Ordinal Scales rank order
Rank ordered test scores are reported as percentile rank (PR)
scoresnot to be confused with the familiar percentage
scores widely used in school grading.
3. Interval Scales - also known as equal-unit scales, numbers
acquire yet one more important property.
4. Ratio Scales - Within ratio scales, numbers achieve the
property of additivity, which means they can be addedas well
as subtracted, multiplied, and dividedand the result
expressed as a ratio, all with meaningful results.
 TYPES OF STATISTICS

Numbers and graphs used to describe, condense, or

represent data belong in the realm of descriptive statistics

When data are used to estimate population values based on

sample values or to test hypotheses, inferential statistics a
more ample set of procedures based on probability theory
are applied.

The words statistic and statistics are also used to refer to

measures derived from sample dataas opposed to those
derived from populations, which are called parameters.
 Parameters are mathematically exact numbers (or constants,
such as ) that are not usually attainable unless a population
is so fixed and circumscribed that all of its members can be
accounted for, such as all the members of a college class in a
given semester.
 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

Raw data are unwieldy

Frequency Distributions - organize raw data in some sensible way
so they can be inspected.
Graphs - once the data have been organized into a frequency
distribution, they can be transposed into any one of several graphic
formats, su
pie charts or bar graphs (for discrete or categorical data)
histograms or frequency polygons (for continuous or metric data).
It is customary to use the horizontal axis (also called the abscissa,
the baseline, or the X-axis) to represent the range of values of the
variable in question and the vertical axis (called the ordinate or Y-
axis) to depict the frequencies with which each of the values occur
in the distribution
 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

Measures of Central Tendency

The principal measures of central tendencythe mode,
median, and meantell us these things.
The mode useful primarily when dealing with qualitative or
categorical variables. If two or more values in a distribution
are tied with the same maximum frequency, the distribution
is said to be bimodal or multimodal
The median (Mdn) is the value that divides a distribution that
has been arranged in order of magnitude into two halves.
The mean or arithmetic average
 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

Measures of Variability
These statistics describe how much dispersion, or scatter,
there is in a set of data
The range is the distance between two extreme pointsthe
highest and lowest valuesin a distribution
The semi-interquartile range is one half of the interquartile
range (IQR), which, in turn, is the distance between the
points that demarcate the tops of the first and third quarters
of a distribution.
The variance is the sum of the squared differences or
deviations between each value (X) in a distribution and the
mean of that distribution (M ), divided by N.
The standard deviation is the square root of the variance
 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

The Importance of Variability

Whereas it may be true that variety is the spice of life, it is the
very meat of testing.
The psychological testing enterprise depends on variability
across individuals
 PROPERTIES OF THE NORMAL CURVE
MODEL
It is bell shaped, as its nickname indicates.
It is bilaterally symmetrical, which means its two halves are
identical (if wesplit the curve into two, each half contains 50%
of the area under the curve).
It has tails that approach but never touch the baseline, and
thus its limits extend to a property that underscores the
theoretical and mathematical nature of the curve
It is unimodal; that is, it has a single point of maximum
frequency or maximum height
DESCRIPTIVE USES OF THE NORMAL CURVE
MODEL
Normalizing scores involves transforming them so that they
have the same meaning, in terms of their position, as if they
came from a normal distribution.
INFERENTIAL USES OF THE NORMAL CURVE
MODEL
In inferential statistics the normal curve model is useful for
(a) estimating population parameters and
( b) t
Sampling distributions are hypothetical, as opposed to real,
distributions of values predicated on the assumption that an
infinite number of samples of a given size could be drawn
from a population testing hypotheses about differences.
The standard error (SE ) of an obtained sample statistic is
thus conceived of as the standard deviation of the sampling
distribution that would result if we obtained the same
statistic from a large number of randomly drawn samples of
equal size
Kurtosis
This rather odd term, which stems from the Greek word for
convexity, simply refers to the flatness or peakedness of a
distribution.
Skewness
The skewness (Sk) of a distribution refers to a lack of symmetry.
Most of the values are at the top end of the scale and the longer
tail extends toward the bottom, the distribution is negatively
skewed (Sk < 0);
Most of the values are at the bottom and the longer tail extends
toward the top of the scale, the distribution is positively skewed
(Sk > 0).
With correlation we enter the realm of bivariate or multivariate
statistics.
Linear Correlation
The relationship between two variables is said to be linear
when the direction and rate of change in one variable are
constant w
(a) a positive correlation
( b) a negative correlation with regard to the changes in the
other variable.
 THE DISCOVERY OF REGRESSION

One of the most important of these was Galtons discovery of

the phenomenon he called regression, a discovery that
resulted from his attempts to chart the resemblance between
parents and offspring on a number of variables and to
produce evidence of their hereditary nature.
 CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS

Correlation simply refers to the extent to which variables are

related.
The degree and the direction of the correlation between
variables is measured by means of various types of
correlation coefficients, which are numbers that can
fluctuate anywhere from 1.00 to +1.00

The basic formula that Karl Pearson devised for computing

the correlation coefficient of bivariate data from a sample is
formally known as the Pearson product moment correlation
coefficient.
 OTHER CORRELATIONAL METHODS

The Pearson r can be used in a wide range of cases, as long as

the necessary conditions are met.
When the variables to be correlated are in ordinal form, the
correlation method of choicealready mentioned in
connection with ordinal scalesis Spearmans rank-
difference coefficient of correlation, commonly known as
Spearmans rho (rS).
If the relationship between two variables is curvilinear, the
correlation ratiocommonly known as eta () may be
used.
 OTHER CORRELATIONAL METHODS

When one of the variables to be correlated is dichotomous,

the point biserial correlation, or rpb , is used,
whereas if both variables are dichotomous, the phi or
fourfold coefficient () is employed

One particularly important variant is the multiple correlation

coefficient (R), which is used when a single dependent
variable (Y) is correlated with two or more combined
predictors (X1, X 2, . . . , Xk ).