Creating a Link Analysis Link analysis is a simple technique used in intelligence analysis to demonstrate the connections or relationships between people. It is commonly used in social science research, criminal investigations and national security. The first step to link analysis is to collect the data, and decide on a coding scheme. An example coding…
Month: January 2015
Z-Scores
Z Scores were a concept I had trouble with in University. It’s actually not as difficult as they’re made out to be. I’ll spare you the complicated introduction (as I’m sure you got one from both your textbook and your Professor), but remember that z-scores show you the distance between your score and the mean,…
Dispersion and Variability (Standard Deviation)
The topics dispersion and variability (or variance) describes the “spread” of data in a distribution. This article explains how to compute the variance and the standard. The first measure of dispersion to look at is the variance. Let’s look at the data set below: X Values 4 5 2 7 Steps to Calculate Variance:…
Measures of Central Tendency
The measures of central tendency are processes for determining what the central value in a dataset is. The most common is the arithmetic average, or mean – so this value has come to be known as simply the average. The three measures of central tendency are mean, median and mode. Mean To calculate the mean…
Frequency Distributions
Frequency distributions are a simple way of organizing data based on how many each item has occurred. This can be used for individual values or for age ranges. The steps for making a frequency distribution are pretty simple. Let’s take a set of 20 students and their ages: 18 17 17 18 15 15 17…