ABSTRACT
Researchers use exploratory and descriptive statistics for such tasks as describing a sample, providing a quantitative summary of a variable, summarizing a dataset, and similar purposes. Of all the various statistics available for these purposes, four classes of descriptive statistics are used in almost every political science research study:
1. Measures of central tendency (or measures of location) 2. Measures of variability 3. Measures of relative position 4. Measures of correlation
These four types of measurements make it possible to reduce a large dataset to a smaller amount of meaningful numbers that everyone can understand. They provide essential information about the internal structure of the raw data (Lang and Heiss 1994).
