Module 3: Overview Descriptive Statistics

Once sampled data have been gathered and graphically displayed using one or more methods (e.g., bar chart, pie chart, histogram, or trend line over time), the next step in the analysis is to summarize the data by applying statistics. Statistics is a science that deals with summarizing data (Lial, Hungerford, & Holcomb, 2011), specifically referred to as descriptive statistics. The data is a randomly collected sample of an overall population, where an analyst is attempting to describe a populations parameter, designated by a variable, by the samples descriptive statistic (Sharpe, De Veaux, Velleman, & Berkowitz, 2014).

Data can be a qualitative or quantitative variable (George, Rowlands, Price, & Maxey, 2005). A qualitative variable, also...