ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces descriptive statistics, what they are, what they mean, when and how to use them. This includes: a cautionary note about missing data and how to address this problem; frequencies, percentages and crosstabulations and different ways of presenting and displaying these; measures of central tendency (means, modes, medians) and dispersal (standard deviation and range); correlations and measures of association with different kinds (scales) of data and how to interpret them; partial correlations; and statistical reliability. The chapter indicates the ‘safety checks’ that have to be applied before deciding on and working with the statistics introduced in this chapter, and it provides the SPSS command sequences for such calculations, with worked examples from SPSS tables of output. It also includes examples of how to report results using the different statistics in this chapter.
