What Is Standard Error?

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Brian with ericksontutoring.blogspot.com. Today, we're going to discuss what standard error is. So, standard error is a fairly common statistical measure that's used to express the amount of variance from a mean in your data. It's easily and often confused with standard deviation. So, I'm going to try to clarify those two. Standard deviation is just a measure of variance in your recorded sample. So, sayin', how far from the median or the average is each individual data point? So, that's standard deviation. Then you have standard error, standard error takes into account your sample size as well. So, it takes your standard deviation, it's a type of standard deviation but it's divided by the sample size. So, the population size that you sample, and what this does is as your sample size increases you become a little more confident in the variance and how far your standard deviation is changing. So, really standard error is taking into account the size of your sample and it's allowing you to extrapolate from that single sample to an entire population. So, they are different but it's hard to always distinguish between the two. So, this has been a brief discussion of what standard error actually is."