Skewness – Floor & Ceiling Effects

In this video I explain how skewness in a sample may be caused by a floor or a ceiling effect, in which the measurement isn’t able to capture variability at the low or high end of a population’s distribution. A … Read More

Skewness – Positive & Negative Skew

In this video I explain one way in which a distribution can deviate from normality, which is skewness. I explain the difference between positive and negative skew, and how these can be seen in histograms, stem and leaf displays, and … Read More

Histograms & Frequency Polygons

In this video I explain the difference between histograms and bar charts, look at the creation of histograms and frequency polygons for continuous variables, and then discuss why we want to get a sense of the shape of a distribution … Read More

Exploratory Data Analysis: Box & Whisker Plots

In this video I describe box-and-whisker plots, or boxplots, developed by John Tukey. First we’ll look at a simple box-and-whisker plot, then we’ll see some variations depending on the data, some different sets of terminology that can be used when … Read More

Exploratory Data Analysis: Stem & Leaf Displays

In this video I explain stem-and-leaf displays or stemplots, which are part of exploratory data analysis developed by John W. Tukey. I explain the basic design of stem-and-leaf displays as well as several variations including back-to-back stem-and-leaf displays and stretched … Read More

How to Interpret (and Create) Frequency Distribution Tables

In this video I explain frequency distribution tables and grouped frequency distribution tables for summarizing data. I explain each of the columns, including the variable measured, the frequency, the proportion and percentage of the data at each variable, and the … Read More

n-1 Explained Conceptually

In this video I answer the common question of why we divide by n-1 when calculating variance from a sample, known as Bessel’s Correction. I focus on conceptual understanding of why this adjustment is needed and why n-1 is the … Read More

Inclusive vs. Exclusive Interquartile Range

In this video I explain the difference between calculating an exclusive interquartile range and an inclusive interquartile range. While we generally use an exclusive interquartile range with an even set of scores, when we have an odd-numbered set of scores … Read More