Whereas descriptive statistics are used to describe a sample’s characteristics, inferential statistics are used to infer something about the population based on the sample’s characteristics. At several points throughout the first half of Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics, we have emphasized that a hallmark of good scientific research is choosing a sample in such a way that it is representative of the population from which it was selected. The process then becomes an inferential one, in which you infer from the smaller sample to the larger population based on the results of
...more
