From the course: SPSS for Academic Research

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Normal distribution

Normal distribution - SPSS Statistics Tutorial

From the course: SPSS for Academic Research

Start my 1-month free trial

Normal distribution

- [Instructor] You've got your sample, and you've run some stats and you've retrieved the sample mean. Now, how confident are you that this statistic represents the actual population parameter? Sure, you've randomly sampled. Sure, you have a large sample size, but is that enough? Well, even if you're not super-confident, we can use a normal distribution to help us create a range around the sample mean that's very likely to contain the true population parameter. Let's take a look at this normal distribution. The properties of a normal distribution allow us to determine how confident we can be in our estimate. The normal distribution is essentially a probability distribution. The center-most point is the mean, the X-axis is the variable, and the Y-axis is the frequency distribution. The total area under a curve is equal to 100%. If we were to imagine women's heights from our sample being plotted on here as a histogram, the majority of the heights would be in the middle of the…

Contents