ABSTRACT
There are a number of linguistic studies which examine regional responses to accents or other linguistic features and some of these look at gendered responses. In describing the data with numbers this chapter first looks at the measures of central tendency (or averages), then the measures of spread; and also looks at whether the data falls into a regular pattern called a normal distribution. One of the most useful starting places for a comparison between two groups is a boxplot. By default, SPSS creates boxplot graphs that are based on the median score rather than a mean and draws the boxes to include 25" of the scores above and below the median. SPSS uses this as a default because it is probably the most useful boxplot to draw. Certain statistical tests (t-tests and ANOVAs and some more powerful correlation techniques) need the data to be roughly normal. Such tests are sometimes called parametric tests.
