Eric Bohlman wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Doug) wrote in > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: > >> Hi, >> >> I was sitting through a presentation of some research yesterday about >> the results of a pilot study where a control group was compared with >> a treatment group and I found that I was rather confused about the >> use >> of the term standard error. The researcher appeared to be saying >> something about having too small a standard error was not a good >> thing. >> >> Could someone please explain or link me to a page where I could get >> some detailed information about use of the standard error. I think >> that it is a measure of the standard deviation of the sample means, >> but this doesn't appear to be the context that was used (from my >> understanding). > > It's the standard deviation of a computed statistic, of which the > sample mean is only one case. >
Usually it will be an estimate of the theoretical standard deviation of a statistic, and it may be that the speaker thought that his way of estimating the theoretical standard deviation produced answers that were too small (possibly by discounting/ignoring effects that are important). David Jones . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
