ABSTRACT
Two main types of statistics are descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. These are often used in a complementary way within quantitative research studies. As the name suggests, ‘descriptive’ statistics describe samples using sample statistics such as averages or frequencies. Descriptive statistics are used within a reductionist research approach whereby we gather data for a sample of individual participants from a population of interest and summarize the sample using descriptive statistics. If a large enough random sample is used, then researchers may generalize the findings for the sample to be relevant to the whole population from which the sample was drawn. Descriptive statistics are concerned with facts such as ‘how many’, ‘how few’, ‘how high’, ‘how low’. The ‘how many’ and ‘how few’ type questions are answered using frequency profiles. How many of the sample are males? How many are females? The ‘how high’ and ‘how low’ type questions are answered using averages such as the mean or median value for the sample. When considering how high or low some average value is, we are often also interested in how consistent the sample is about this average. Do all of the participants have values close to the sample average? Do the participants have a wide range of values either side of the average? Descriptive statistics, such as the standard deviation or the inter-quartile range, are used to describe how consistent a sample is about the mean and the median respectively.
