In response to your peers, comment on facts about the normal distribution your peers have posted, supporting your response by explaining why it captures your interest or describing how the principle can be applied in psychology and/or everyday life.
Savanna post
The normal distribution is an interesting statistical unit because it almost always applies to all studies done in psychology. It is a bell curve and from it we can infer the direction of the results. This is so interesting to me because it doesn’t matter what the study is about, it can be a study about the impact of a dog in a childhood home, or the impact of addiction and job performance. The studies are unrelated in many ways, yet the results will have the same normal distribution. 95% of both data sets will have results within 2 standard deviations of the mean, which will create this curve. An example of this in my life would be my work every day. I work in Logistics, specifically eCommerce and we are currently doing a study on glove performance and different types of gloves and lifespan and quality. We finished up our study today and surveyed the associates who participated. I then took that data and created a bar chart, but after reading this chapter I was interested and created a histogram with the quality lifespan results, and sure enough I got a very narrow bell shaped curve. All of my data points besides 1 were within 2 standard deviations of my mean. It was really neat to apply this concept to my actual work and added a statistic to help us make a more informed decision.
Esmeralda post
There are a couple of things that I found interesting about normal distribution. The first thing I found pretty cool was that it is characterized by the bell shaped curve which is defined by the probability density. Another this was that the means for a data set is the same as the peak of the distribution bell. Also an important thing is that normal distribution is not just used for statistic but it is also used in psychology. It helps to get a better understanding of a graph in a histogram or even a common shape. Since I have been pregnant twice I didn’t realize that this could also be used to show the possibility of someone going into labor 15 days before and within 15 days after. Although this was a lot of information that was very new to me I found that a lot of it interesting and a lot hard to understand.
