Descriptive Statistics
Statistics & analysis
Summaries of a dataset — means, medians, standard deviations, frequencies, percentages — that describe what the data look like before any inference is attempted.
Descriptive statistics summarise the data you actually collected without generalising beyond it. They cover central tendency (mean, median, mode), dispersion (standard deviation, variance, range, interquartile range) and the shape of the distribution (skewness and kurtosis).
Their role in a thesis is foundational. The results chapter conventionally opens with a sample profile — frequencies and percentages for demographic and categorical variables — followed by means and standard deviations for the continuous measures, before any hypothesis testing begins.
They also serve as a diagnostic step, revealing out-of-range values, impossible entries, missing-data patterns and severe skew that would undermine later parametric tests. Match the statistic to the measurement level: mean and standard deviation for interval and ratio data, median and interquartile range for ordinal or heavily skewed data, mode and frequencies for nominal data.
Where it's used
- Profiling respondents in the analysis chapter's opening section
- Screening data for errors and outliers before hypothesis testing
Software used
Related concepts
Guides that use this concept
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