Question

Identify 3 research scenarios that might provide a low, medium, and high degree of variability in the study data, and describe how the outcome of a given study can be influenced by variability in the data

Answer 1

Variability can dramatically reduce your statistical power during hypothesis testing. Statistical power is the probability that a test will detect a difference that actually exists.It’s always a good practice to understand the variability present in your subject matter and how it impacts your ability to draw conclusions. Even when you can't reduce the variability, you can plan accordingly in order to assure that your study has adequate power.

A measure of variability is a summary statistic that represents the amount of dispersion in a dataset. How spread out are the values? While a measure of central tendency describes the typical value, measures of variability define how far away the data points tend to fall from the center. We talk about variability in the context of a distribution of values. A low dispersion indicates that the data points tend to be clustered tightly around the center. High dispersion signifies that they tend to fall further away.