APA Style Introduction. Using Statistics in Sociology
APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social
sciences including Psychology and Sociology. The following link from Purdue University will help you
understand how to use APA format. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/10/
This resource offers examples for the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations,
endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page.
Writing with Statistics
This can be a tricky business. The casual reader doesn't understand statistics in any great depth, while
the experienced reader often knows a lot about the subject. Balancing between these two extremes is
often difficult, and far from natural. The following resource is meant as a guide to writing statistics. This
guide is not meant to teach you statistics, but rather how to use statistics more effectively in your
writing.
What is a Statistic: In the casual sense, a statistic is any number that describes a group of objects. There
are two main categories of statistics, descriptive and inferential.
Descriptive: Statistics that merely describe the group they belong to.
Inferential: Statistics that are used to draw conclusions about a larger group of people.
Examples of Descriptive Statistics
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The class did well on its first exam, with a mean (average) score of 89.5% and a standard
deviation of 7.8%.
This season, the Big High School Hockey Team scored a mean (average) of 2.3 goals per game.
Many times, however this group of objects is a smaller subset of a larger group. By examining the
smaller subset, it is often thought that information can be inferred upon the larger population. This is
the basis of inferential statistics.
Examples of Inferential Statistics
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According to our recent poll, 43% of Americans brush their teeth incorrectly.
Our research indicates that only 33% of people like purple cars.
In these last two examples, the researchers have not studied all people, they have studied a small group
of people, and are generalizing the results to lots of people. This is known as inferential statistics,
because you are inferring about a large group from a smaller group. If you merely want to describe the
data that you have for one single group, then you are using descriptive statistics. If you want to say
something about a larger group, or you want your reader to infer something about a larger group, then
you need to use inferential statistics. It is important to understand the difference between these two
because how you use a statistic depends on what type of statistic it is.