My post to the universe of nothingness has just disappeared.....

@Former-Member The SE of the mean is the standard deviation of the distribution of the means. That is, suppose you were to take a hundred different samples from the population. Each of those samples would have a different mean. If you graphed all those means, the distribution of these means would be a normal distribution (even if the population from which they came wasn't normally distributed). This is the central limit theorum. Suppose that the mean of this distribution was 10. Most of the means will hover around 10, but some will be way out from it. If the CI was [8, 12] this would tell us that we can be 95% sure the "true mean" is between 8 and 12.

Hi @Former-Member,

95% of scores fall between -1.96 and +1.96 standard deviations. So...if you have the mean and the SE (which is the SD of the distribution of means), then you can calculate the values for -1.96 and +1.96 SDs. These become your 95% CI.

For example, if the Mean was 10 and the SE was 2, then the 95% CI would be 10 plus or minus (2 x 1.96) which would be [6.08, 13.92]. Thus you would know that there is a 95% chance that the true mean lies between 6.08 and 13.92.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to jump off the forums now @Former-Member. I hope that helps a bit.

Night.

@Former-Member, @Baboo, @Phoenix_Rising

Thanks for all your support when I was flipping out and losing my mind.

It is very much appreciated. Having someone know that I'm struggling and being there makes such a huge amount of difference. I'm not fully sure why, but it really helps me to be able to cope. Being able to rant and rave and be listened and supported..... almost makes it okay.

Thanks!