ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics do what they say: they describe, so that researchers can then analyse and interpret what these descriptions mean. This chapter introduces some key descriptive statistics and how to use them. This includes:
Descriptive statistics include frequencies, measures of dispersal (standard deviation), measures of central tendency (means, modes, medians), standard deviations, crosstabulations and standardized scores. We address all these in this chapter, with the exception of standardized scores, which we keep for Chapter 36.
