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Statisticians refer to an entire group that is being studied as a population. Each member of the population is called
a unit. In this example, the population is all Galapagos Tortoises, and the units are the individual tortoises. It is not
necessary for a population or the units to be living things, like tortoises or people. For example, an airline employee
could be studying the population of jet planes in her company by studying individual planes.
A researcher studying Galapagos Tortoises would be interested in collecting information about different characteristics
of the tortoises. Those characteristics are called variables. Each column of the previous figure contains a
variable. In the first column, the tortoises are labeled according to the island (or volcano) where they live, and in the
second column, by the scientific name for their species. When a characteristic can be neatly placed into well-defined
groups, or categories, that do not depend on order, it is called a categorical variable, or qualitative variable.
The last three columns of the previous figure provide information in which the count, or quantity, of the characteristic
is most important. For example, we are interested in the total number of each species of tortoise, or how many
individuals there are per square kilometer. This type of variable is called a numerical variable, or quantitative
variable.
Jill Schmidlkofer - Personal Name
1st Edition
NONE
Statistics
Management
English
CK-12 Foundation
2013
1-308
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