Posts tagged stats terms
Confusing Stats Terms Explained: Internal Consistency

Internal consistency refers to the general agreement between multiple items (often likert scale items) that make-up a composite score of a survey measurement of a given construct. This agreement is generally measured by the correlation between items.

For example, a survey measure of depression may include many questions that each measure various aspects of depression, such as:

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Confusing Stats Terms Explained: Heteroscedasticity (Heteroskedasticity)

Heteroscedasticity is a hard word to pronounce, but it doesn't need to be a difficult concept to understand. Put simply, heteroscedasticity (also spelled heteroskedasticity) refers to the circumstance in which the variability of a variable is unequal across the range of values of a second variable that predicts it.

A scatterplot of these variables will often create a cone-like shape, as the scatter (or variability) of the dependent variable (DV) widens or narrows as the value of the independent variable (IV) increases. The inverse of heteroscedasticity is homoscedasticity...

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Confusing Stats Terms Explained: Residual

When I hear the word "residual", the pulp left over after I drink my orange juice pops into my brain, or perhaps the film left on the car after a heavy rain. However, when my regression model spits out an estimate of my model's residual, I'm fairly confident it isn't referring to OJ or automobile gunk...right?  Not so fast, that imagery is more similar to it's statistical meaning than you might initially think.

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Confusing Stats Terms Explained: Multicollinearity

Multicollinearity said in "plain English" is redundancy. Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple, but it's a good place to start.  Put simply, multicollinearity is when two or more predictors in a regression are highly related to one another, such that they do not provide unique and/or independent information to the regression.

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Top Ten Tips for Data Analysis to Make Your Research Life Easier!

While there is no "magic bullet" to make stats and data analysis easy to understand and helpful in our research, there are some things that you can do to avoid pitfalls and help things run smoothly. This "top ten" list offers a few of those things that I think you will find helpful! I'll be posting a video of this list later today on my Stats Videos page.

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