What's your understanding of a standard error? [General Sta­tis­tics]

posted by ElMaestro  – Denmark, 2016-12-26 20:05 (3463 d 07:17 ago) – Posting: # 16878
Views: 11,125

Hi all,

I can relate to quite a few more or less abstract quantities or objects that we encounter in BE, e.g. critical t-value, or a treatment effect or a density function or a model matrix or....
One of the things I cannot easily relate to (as in: interpret or graphically visualize inside my little head) is the standard error.
Example: the SE is a quantity that is factored onto the cricial t-value to determine the width of a confidence interval, given a set of observations. Yeah right, professor!).
Another example: "The standard error (SE) is the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of a statistic" (from Wikipedia). Yeah right, professor!

So, a question to you experts: How do you interpret the SE (of a mean or of something else)?
I am not asking about a reference to Wikipedia or a stats text which defines it or shows how to calculate it. I've read those:-D. I am solely asking about an interpretation of SE's for dummies.

Thanks if anyone can help.

Pass or fail!
ElMaestro

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