ABSTRACT
When you have collected data about participants you will want to produce a summary which will give an impression of the results for the participants you have studied. Imagine that you have given a group of 15 adults a list of 100 words and you have asked each person to recall as many of the words as he or she can. The recall scores are as follows:
3, 7, 5, 9, 4, 6, 5, 7, 8, 11, 10, 7, 4, 6, 8
This is a list of what is termed the raw data. As it stands, it provides little information about the phenomenon being studied. The reader could scan the raw data and try to get a feel for what it is like but it is more useful to use some form of summary statistic or graphical display to present the data. This is even truer when there are even more data points.
