Psychology

Descriptive and inferential statistics are the two most general types of statistics that are being used in researches and similar studies. Descriptive statistics are the type of statistics that provides the summaries of numeric data in an organized and straightforward manner (Levinson, 2002). Inferential statistics on the other hand, is the type of statistics that is uses a small set of data to come up with educated guess or inference about the larger set of data represented by the smaller data set (Levinson, 2002)

    Both statistics are often used in researches like criminal justice researchers, clinical researchers, and psychological and social researches. An example of application of descriptive statistics is on the computation of grades of students attending a particular class. Descriptive statistics may take the form of the average grade or the ranking of grades from the highest to the lowest, the total number of students with grades belonging to a particular range, or how often or frequent does a particular grade was incurred in the said class. So in its sense, descriptive statistics are used if you want to describe the characteristic of the population you are interested with.

    However, if you are to determine the future performance of the students in the said class, you are then deploying inferential statistics. Say if four out of five students will fair well in the midterm exam, then you can say that around eighty percent (80) of the students attending the said class will pass the final exam. Another example of inferential statistics is if you want to determine which of the boys and girls will perform well in the final exam.  Collecting a sample of boys and a sample of girls and determining the percentage of those passing in each gender will more or less give you an idea who will perform well and not during the final exam.