ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the first step in making sense of data–applying descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics used to inform decision making, illustrate operations, and to describe the information in a simple way. In statistics, the chapter relies on three primary measures of central tendency to provide a common framework: mode, median, and mean. An important difference between the mode and the other measures of central tendency is that a data set may have multiple modes. The mean is the most used measure of central tendency, in part, because of the ease of calculation but also because this ease of calculation makes it convenient to embed in more complex statistical tools. The median is less often used because it requires some manual manipulation of the data to identify, but as a measure of central tendency it is far more robust to extreme values than the mean.
