ABSTRACT

Introduction The first phase of data analysis is the production of a summary of the data. This way of describing the data can be done numerically or graphically. It is particularly useful because it can show whether the results of research are in line with the researcher’s hypotheses. Statisticians see an increasing importance for this stage and have described it as exploratory data analysis (EDA) (see Tukey, 1977). Psychologists have tended to under-use EDA as a stage in their analysis.