This is a simplified version of our descriptive statistics tool which calculates the sample mean and the associated standard error. It is designed for professionals who only need this statistic.
The standard error of a parameter is defined as the standard deviation of the sampling distribution. A sampling distribution is the expected distribution of that statistic if you took multiple samples from the underlying population. So the sampling distribution of the sample mean would be the distribution of the means of repeated samples from a population. The standard deviation of this sampling distribution is the standard error of the sample mean.
The standard error can be used to develop confidence intervals for the unknown population mean. It can be used to assess the degree of precision of your estimate or measurement process. The relative standard error of a survey can be computed as the ratio of its standard error to the sample mean. A lower relative standard error indicates higher precision in the findings between studies, regardless of any differences in the sample mean. This is commonly used to set standards of significant for scientific review and publication processes; supporting surveys must satisfy a certain level of precision and reliability in their findings to quality for publication.
This tool is developed so you can save your data and use it in our other calculators. Simply hit "save data" and enter a name for this data set. It will be added to the menu shown alongside (or below) the calculators. When you open another page on our site, you will see a list of saved datasets. Simply click on that item and it will pre-populate the calculator box.
