I'm interesed to know how to quantify measurments error (in percentage) in morphological study.?
In a morphological study the easily assess the individual variation in taking the standard deviation of your measurement and divide by the arithmetical mean expresses as a precentage. Eberhard Curio
As long as I understand you are first interested in the uncertainty (or the precision) of the measurements (i.e. the length of a bone or a leg, measured with a tape measure).
One way to get the uncertainty is to repeat several times (some dozen times) the same measurement of the same object and then to take the standard deviation of your measurement (absolute uncertainty) and divide it by the arithmetical mean expressed as a percentage (relative uncertainty). You can also estimate the 95% confidence interval of your measurement (for ex. if you repeat 100 times the measure of a 80 cm piece of wood with a carpenter measuring tape, maybe you'll get a mean value = 79.9 cm and sd=0.3 cm, i.e. a 95%CI ~ [79.3cm - 80.5 cm], and the relative uncertainty would be about 0.4%,
Assessing the uncertainty may help in the choice of devices used for measurement (in the example, you can compare a carpenter tape measure, a tailor tape measure, and a measuring calliper).
Therefore, using the device with an acceptable uncertainty, you can study the individual variation within the population ( coefficient of variation: the standard deviation, divided by the absolute value of the arithmetic mean).
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Zoology
- Invertebrate Zoology
- Entomology