I was wondering why some experimental studies use standard error of the mean instead of standard deviation. On what basis do they use it in describing data
If you want to use the sample mean as an estimate of the population mean (or the location parameter in your distribution model), you need to use the standard error that is a measure of the quality of your estimated population mean. The standard error is often known as the Type A standard uncertainty in measurment uncertianty analysis according to the GUM.
Standard deviations are typically reported as descriptive statistics to provide a sense of how widely dispersed the observations are around the mean. In contrast, standard errors are used in tests of significance.
Standard Deviation: The Difference. The standard deviation measures the amount of variability, or dispersion for a a data from the mean, and its usually used for when you want to tell variability and spread and its static,
the standard error of the mean measures how far the sample mean of the data is likely to be from the true population mean , its used for precision issues like comparing and testing differences.
Thanks a lot for your answers. This means that when we want to compare the difference between experimental groups (n = 5) receiving different substances, it is the SEM that is most suitable.
Stéphane Zingue Please clarify what you want to compare: (a) the difference between two groups (or two samples) or (b) the difference between two sample means. The answer to (a) and (b) will be different. Detailed discussion about solving these two problems can be found in Preprint Exceedance probability analysis: a practical and effective a...
Thank you for this precision Hening Huang! For me it is (a).
Thanks!
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