ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the four major descriptive statistics used in social and administrative science research and includes an introduction to the idea of data distributions. Descriptive statistics are used to summarize data and describe samples. Researchers use four different types of descriptive statistics to convey summary information: measures of central tendency, measures of variability, measures of relative position, and measures of correlation. All of these statistics can be quickly calculated with Microsoft Excel. Four measures of central tendency can be used in descriptive statistics: arithmetic mean, median, mode, and geometric mean. Three measures of variability: the range, the variance, and the standard deviation. Distributions that take on the shape of a bell are considered to be "normal" distributions. Most distributions will approximate a normal distribution, although some distributions will be positively or negatively skewed; others still may be bi or multimodal distributions. Most distributions encountered in public administration and social science research tend to be normal.
