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What does the s stand for in statistics?
Usually s means standard deviation of a sample.
What does it means if the standard deviation is large?
that you have a large variance in the population and/or your sample size is too small
What does Sx mean in mathematics?
Sx means the sample standard deviation of the variable "x".
How do you calculate standard deviation without a normal distribution?
You calculate standard deviation the same way as always. You find the mean, and then you sum the squares of the deviations of the samples from the means, divide by N-1, and then take the square root. This has nothing to do with whether you have a normal distribution or not. This is how you calculate sample standard deviation, where the mean is determined along with the standard deviation, and the N-1 factor represents the loss of a degree of freedom in doing so. If you knew the mean a priori, you could calculate standard deviation of the sample, and only use N, instead of N-1.
Why is the standard deviation of a distribution of means smaller than the standard deviation of the population from which it was derived?
The reason the standard deviation of a distribution of means is smaller than the standard deviation of the population from which it was derived is actually quite logical. Keep in mind that standard deviation is the square root of variance. Variance is quite simply an expression of the variation among values in the population. Each of the means within the distribution of means is comprised of a sample of values taken randomly from the population. While it is possible for a random sample of multiple values to have come from one extreme or the other of the population distribution, it is unlikely. Generally, each sample will consist of some values on the lower end of the distribution, some from the higher end, and most from near the middle. In most cases, the values (both extremes and middle values) within each sample will balance out and average out to somewhere toward the middle of the population distribution. So the mean of each sample is likely to be close to the mean of the population and unlikely to be extreme in either direction. Because the majority of the means in a distribution of means will fall closer to the population mean than many of the individual values in the population, there is less variation among the distribution of means than among individual values in the population from which it was derived. Because there is less variation, the variance is lower, and thus, the square root of the variance - the standard deviation of the distribution of means - is less than the standard deviation of the population from which it was derived.
