What are inferential statistics and how are they used?
Inferential statistics allow us to make decisions about a large group (usually referred to as a population) based upon observations made within a small group selected from that population (usually referred to as a sample. This ability to infer something about a population based upon a sample allows a deeper understanding of data beyond what descriptive statistics alone can offer. Sometimes knowing the mean of a group of scores is enough information. Still, inferential statistics allows us to compare the…