What Is Variability

What is variability, additionally why does variability decrease as the population becomes larger?

Statistics can simply be described as the study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation of data. It deals with all aspects of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments. In other words, it is the practice of collecting and analysing numerical data in large quantities, especially for the purpose of inferring proportions in a whole from those in a representative sample. Statistics can be broken down into two statistical methods known as descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Firstly, descriptive statistics are used to describe the basic features of the data in a study. They provide simple summaries about the sample and the measures. Together with simple graphics analysis, they form the basis of virtually every quantitative analysis of data. Basically, with the use of descriptive statistics, you are describing what is or what the data shows. On the other hand, inferential statistics can be described as reaching conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone. Inferential statistics can be used to gather information from sample data about what a population might think or to make inferences about a population, for example the probability that something occurs by chance.

Nevertheless, variability can be considered as a descriptive method of statistics. Variability simply means how ‘spread out’ a group of scores is or the difference in data. Populations can be described as homogenous or heterogeneous based on the level of variability in the data set. There are three measures of variability which provide an estimate of how much scores in a distribution vary from an average score which is the mean. It is important to note that the bigger the quantity of scores, the more it varies and the smaller the quantity of scores the less it varies.

Firstly, the range is a...