Deviance (statistics)

Deviance is a funny word that scientists use to measure how far away something is from what they expect. Imagine you and your friends are playing a game of basketball. If you shoot the ball and it goes in the hoop, that's great! But if you shoot it and it misses very badly, that's not what we expected, and it's called a deviant shot.

Now, let's say we have some numbers we want to look at. Maybe we want to figure out how many people are born in a certain city each year. We have an idea of what we expect that number to be, based on past years. If we look at the actual number and it's very different from what we expected, we can call it deviant. That's what we use "deviance" for in statistics.

Scientists use deviance to help them figure out if their ideas and predictions are accurate. They want to know if the real numbers are close to what they expected, or if there's something weird going on that requires more study. So, deviance is a way of measuring how "off" the real numbers are from what we thought they'd be.