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standard error
This term is a technical statistical measure used to quantify the precision of an estimate. It is frequently confused with standard deviation; however, while standard deviation describes the spread of individual data points within a single sample, standard error describes the variability of a sample statistic across multiple hypothetical samples.
In academic and scientific writing, it is typically used in the context of confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. It is almost exclusively used as a countable noun in research papers, often appearing in the plural when referring to the errors associated with multiple different parameters.
Meanings
The standard deviation of the sampling distribution of a statistic, typically the sample mean, which quantifies the amount of variation expected between the sample statistic and the true population parameter.
The researcher calculated the standard error to determine how much the sample mean was likely to vary from the true population mean.