ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors begin with their examination of descriptive statistics, which they previously defined as techniques that allow us to tabulate, summarize, and depict a collection of data in an abbreviated fashion. They utilize the example of collecting data from 100,000 graduate students on various characteristics. The authors deal with the details of the construction of tables and figures for purposes of describing data and consider the following types of tables: frequency distributions, cumulative frequency distributions, relative frequency distributions, and cumulative relative frequency distributions. They show how the data for a single variable can be represented, but in a graphical display rather than a tabular display. A popular method used for displaying nominal scale data in graphical form is the bar graph. Cumulative frequencies of data that have at least some rank order, can be displayed as a cumulative frequency polygon.
