IBM SPSS Essentials, 2nd Edition

8Hypothesis Testing

Chapter Menu

• Chapter Learning Objectives
• Descriptive Versus Inferential Statistics
• Hypothesis Testing (A Process for Interpreting Inferential Statistics)
• Summary

Chapter Learning Objectives

1. Descriptive versus inferential statistics
2. Six‐step hypothesis testing
3. SPSS's focus on Step 5

This book is primarily intended for a very specific audience: students who are learning statistics in a classroom format while also learning how to perform statistical analyses in a separate lab course. This book is not intended to teach you statistical analyses. Rather, it assumes that you already know about analyses (from your statistics instructor) and have a need or desire to compute statistical indices via SPSS. This book, then, is a guide to help you learn SPSS, not statistics. This chapter, however, does provide a brief overview of how we believe you should think about statistics and where SPSS fits within that thinking.

Descriptive Versus Inferential Statistics

One of the most important distinctions you make as a statistician is between descriptive and inferential statistics. This is because there are two primary purposes for statistics: the simple description of data or the desire to say something about a larger group of individuals based on information taken from a subset. Although it is important for you to be able to distinguish between these two categories ...