Statistics help

[T.Vengeance]

I'm doing a physics lab analysis right now and they're asking for how consistent is my data. Through searching online, I realized that I could use the percentage of data that falls within one standard deviation from the mean to determine consistency. At what percentage is the data considered consistent?

[H4X3R]

That entirely depends on the experiment + how much you decide human error is

[Nxl8]

That entirely depends on the experiment + how much you decide human error is

And how accurate your equipment is, if it was measuring to (say) 9 s.f. then your data is most likely going to be more accurate, and potentially more consistent, than it would be at 3 s.f. due to rounding errors etc.

[T.Vengeance]

And how accurate your equipment is, if it was measuring to (say) 9 s.f. then your data is most likely going to be more accurate, and potentially more consistent, than it would be at 3 s.f. due to rounding errors etc.

No, from the data collected was acceleration values of an object in free fall using a motion detector. If anything within one standard deviation of the mean would be considered normal (and therefore acceptable), then the percentage of data within one standard deviation would tell you how consistent the data is right? Or am I missing something here.

 

Link to what I searched up: http://teachertech.rice.edu/Participants/bchristo/lessons/StanDev1.html

 

Right now, I just don't know what percentage is considered inconsistent and what threshold is considered consistent.

[T.Vengeance]

Oh looks like I was thinking about it incorrectly. The standard deviation just means the avg deviation from the mean. So of course there will be data values away from the standard deviation. I was treating the standard deviation as the mean, so I thought that the more values are away from the standard deviation the more inconsistent the values are. Turns out this is exactly what the standard deviation is. The larger the standard deviation, the more inconsistent the data is. 

[ofr057]

I think there asking you to work out the p value of the data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value