Question

Thinking about the research you've been writing about for your assignments, which descriptive statistics do you feel would be most important for you to report if you were to collect and analyze data? Why? How would you visually present this data to your reader? Please be specific.

Answer 1

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

Descriptive statistics can be useful for two purposes: 1) to provide basic information about variables in a dataset and

2) to highlight potential relationships between variables. The three most common descriptive statistics can be displayedgraphically or pictorially and are measures of:

Graphical/Pictorial Methods
Measures of Central Tendency
Measures of Dispersion
Measures of Association

Graphical types:
Histograms
Scatter plots

Measures of Central Tendency

Measures of central tendency are the most basic and, often, the most informative description of a population's characteristics. They describe the "average" member of the population of interest. There are three measures of central tendency:

Mean -- the sum of a variable's values divided by the total number of values
Median -- the middle value of a variable
Mode -- the value that occurs most often

Measures of Dispersion

Measures of dispersion provide information about the spread of a variable's values. There are four key measures of dispersion:

Range
Variance
Standard Deviation
Skew

Measures of Association

Measures of association indicate whether two variables are related. Two measures are commonly used:

Chi-square
Correlation