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Statistics vocabulary · Data and Variables

Observation

Meaning in statistics, with examples

/ˌɑːbzərˈveɪʃən/nounCore term

In statistics, observation means: A single unit of data, such as one person, one transaction or one measurement, usually shown as one row in a data set.

In Turkish: gözlem, kayıt

How it is used

Software output and papers count observations ('n = 1,250 observations'). Close words are case, record and data point; for people, participant or respondent. In research design, 'observation' can also mean a data-collection method based on watching behaviour.

Example sentences

  1. After cleaning, we had 3,412 valid observations.

  2. Each observation is one customer visit, not one customer.

Common collocations

  • number of observations
  • valid observations
  • drop observations
  • independent observations
  • variableAny characteristic that can take different values from one person, object or case to another, such as age, income, gender or test score.
  • sample sizeThe number of observations or participants included in a study, usually written as n (or N for the total).
  • outlierAn observation that lies unusually far from most of the other values in a data set; it may come from an error or from a genuinely unusual case.
  • missing dataValues that should be in a data set but are not, for example because a respondent skipped a question or a measurement failed.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Data and Variables

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