Data Handling: Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics help us summarize and organize large amounts of data in a meaningful way. They can be numerical or graphical.
Two branches of descriptive statistics include measures of central tendency and measures of variability (or dispersion).
Measures of central tendency are ways of finding a “middle” or central value. The mean, median and mode are three types of central tendency.
The mean (average) is calculated by adding up all the values and dividing by the number of values.
Median is the middle score in a list of ordered scores. If the list contains an even number of scores, the median is the average of the two middle scores.
Mode refers to the most frequently occurring value in a data set.
Measures of variability describe the spread of scores in a data set. Two common types are range and standard deviation.
The range is the difference between the lowest and the highest scores in a data set.
Standard deviation shows how much variation there is from the mean (average). Low standard deviation means that most of the numbers are close to the average; a high standard deviation means that the numbers are spread out over a larger range.
Percentiles show the percentage of scores that a particular score is higher than. For example, if a score is in the 85th percentile, it means it is higher than 85% of the other scores.
Graphs and charts like histograms, pie charts, bar graphs, and scatter plots can also be used to visually represent and analyse data in psychology.
It is crucial to interpret data correctly to provide accurate insights into psychological patterns and trends.