ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the details of the construction of tables and figures for purposes of describing data. It considers the following types of tables: frequency distributions, cumulative frequency distributions, relative frequency distributions, and cumulative relative frequency distributions. Relative frequency is simply the percentage of scores contained in an interval; it is also known as a proportion or percentage. The chapter examines several types of graphs for viewing a distribution of scores, which are bar graph, histogram, relative frequency, cumulative frequency and cumulative relative frequency polygons and stem-and-leaf display. The frequency polygon is set up in a fashion similar to the histogram. Cumulative frequencies of data that have at least some rank order, can be displayed as a cumulative frequency polygon. One common way of dividing a distribution of scores into equal groups of scores is known as quartiles.