demographics

Demographics refers to the various social, physical or other characteristics of a human population. In some cases the purpose of statistical analysis may be to measure or explore the demographics themselves. More often we measure demographics (e.g. gender, age, education level) of study participants in case these in some way influence or interact with other things we are primarily interested in. This might be in order to eliminate them from our analysis, often achieved by balancing the different kinds of participants between experimental groups. It may also be used to investigate potential effects, for example, to see if age influences attention span.