Statistics Essay Examples

Example Statistics Essay: Human Variability Social Science Datasets

Human variability is an important component of social science datasets. How do social researchers account for this variability when drawing conclusions from data? Describe two situations in which the basis for these conclusions is undermined.

The information contained in social science datasets aims to provide an accurate description of the social world (Byrne, 1998, p. 126). However individuals within any society are inherently highly variable due to human nature.
The idea of humanness is something which Haslam et al. (2009, p. 55) suggest is ascribed to members of our species in a manner which is largely taken for granted. The notion of what defines humanness or human nature is somewhat tricky to define (Schein, 2010, p. 143). One way of simplifying human variability is to understand it in terms of its genetic basis. The human genome is constructed of more than 35 000 genes; with the exception of monozygotic twins, these are unlikely to be identical for any two individuals on the planet (Naylor & Chen, 2010, p. 275). However variability is likely to be further exacerbated by the influence of social factors, as human nature is formed as a combination of these biological and social influences (Kundu, 2009, p. 16).

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