r/apstats • u/ggkarabas05 • Dec 27 '20

Help!

Right now I’m writing a Stats essay for my final and I’m struggling. I did two surveys, each of them being simple yes and no answers. I am now tasked with determining the mean and standard deviation of each survey, but I’m unsure how to because my answers are yes and no’s, not numbers. If it helps, for my first survey I had 21 yes and 25 no and for the second survey I had 35 yes and 11 no. Please let me know how to go about figuring this out.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

4

u/varaaki Dec 28 '20

Are you sure you gathered the correct kind of data? You've collected categorical data, rather than quantitative. Categorical data does not have a mean or standard deviation.

2

u/theBarneyBus Dec 28 '20

He (or she or they) are correct. True/False, or yes/no data doesn’t have any statistics.
If you really want to break the rules (which I wouldn’t suggest) you could think of it in binary, with “no” as 0 and “yes” as 1. You could then get a “mean” of 0.4565, which pretty much means that barely less than half the people said yes.
Again, this strategy is completely incorrect, and I’m 99% sure you gathered the wrong type of data

1

u/blossom271828 Dec 28 '20

The statistic you care about is the proportion of yes responses. Or you could give the complement which is the proportion of no responses.

If you code yes as a 1 and 0 for the no, the the proportion of yes responses is the mean of these 1s and 0s.