The Fundamentals of Statistics, Research Paper Example

Examine one section of qualitative data (Gender, facility, etc.) and one section of quantitative data (Legal services Satisfaction, Sentence Satisfaction, etc.).

In a Word document, identify the data that you selected, discuss why the data was

selected for the research, and explain what was learned from collecting the data.
I selected gender and length of sentence as my data sets. I selected gender to illustrate the disparity between male and female inmates. I selected length of sentence to investigate the amount of time inmates typically spend incarcerated.

Use Microsoft Excel to find the mean, median, mode, variance, and standard deviation of your two sets of data. Explain why you couldn’t obtain them all for the qualitative data.

Although I was able to have Excel calculate the descriptive statistics for gender, the figures are completely artificial. If 1 represents a gender and 2 represents another, any decimal between the two does not accurately represent some inter-gender characteristic. It is simply an artifact of our calculations. It has no real qualitative significance.

Create a chart or a graph for each field of data. Make sure you label the charts or graphs accordingly.

Discuss what you learned from creating the charts or graphs and explain why charts are important for conveying data. Compile all of the above information into a single, 3 page Word document.

Learned a couple if things here. One is that men far out-number women in prison. The other is that the number of inmates in each sentence category is about the same.