In: Nursing
do you think that descriptive analysis or inferential analysis is more important
Ans) Both descriptive and inferential statistics help make sense out of row after row of data! Use descriptive statistics to summarize and graph the data for a group that you choose. This process allows you to understand that specific set of observations.
- Descriptive statistics describe a sample. That’s pretty straightforward. You simply take a group that you’re interested in, record data about the group members, and then use summary statistics and graphs to present the group properties. With descriptive statistics, there is no uncertainty because you are describing only the people or items that you actually measure. You’re not trying to infer properties about a larger population.
- TheThe process involves taking a potentially large number of data points in the sample and reducing them down to a few meaningful summary values and graphs. This procedure allows us to gain more insights and visualize the data than simply pouring through row upon row of raw numbers!
- Inferential statistics takes data from a sample and makes inferences about the larger population from which the sample was drawn. Because the goal of inferential statistics is to draw conclusions from a sample and generalize them to a population, we need to have confidence that our sample accurately reflects the population. This requirement affects our process.