ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that statistical analysis such as measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, statistical distributions, and displaying data, is a fundamental foundation for data analysis. Understanding variables is essential to understanding statistical analysis. The chapter discusses the basic types of variables, and provides several examples of each type. There are two basic categories for variables, numeric and category. A common measure of the association of two variables is known as correlation. The chapter presents a variety of common statistics used in describing data. Measures of central tendency focus on key features of a distribution and describe a distribution of data in terms of its most frequent, middle, and average data value. Measures of dispersion are used to indicate how the values are in a distribution. A few measures of dispersion are the range, interquartile range, variance, and standard deviation.