ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explore more into the field of descriptive statistics in terms of three general topics: summation notation, measures of central tendency, and measures of dispersion. They aim to provide a summation, central tendency, and dispersion and address outliers and bias. The authors examine deviation scores, population variance and standard deviation, and sample variance and standard deviation, all methods that deal with deviations from the mean. They show what SPSS has to offer in terms of computing measures of central tendency and dispersion and look at the sample variance and standard deviation and how they are computed for large samples of data. In fact, SPSS provides us with many different ways to obtain such measures. Many areas of statistics, including many methods of descriptive and inferential statistics, require the use of summation notation. Many statistics require us to develop “sums” or “totals” in different ways.
