Descriptive Statistics

We often hear that infertile couples are more likely to conceive a child after they adopt a child. Why do people believe that? Because those examples are more vivid and exciting than the more mundane cases where the infertile couples who adopted did not conceive. To know for sure, we collect data and then analyze it using statistics.

Psychologists use statistics to make sense out of the data they collect.

How can statistics help us organize, summarize, and make inferences from the data we have gathered?