ABSTRACT
An early step after collecting and assembling a set of data is to get a sense of its nature: What are the values of individual variables? How similar are the values for different cases? How different are the cases? Over what range are values distributed? Even if the analyst’s purpose is to evaluate associations between variables, he also should describe the values for individual variables. And at times, the main purpose of a study is to obtain data on individual variables, for example when the fire chief or city manager wants to find out the dollar amount of fire damages in the city over the past year.
