Descriptive Statistics, Part II: Most Commonly Used Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive measures can reveal a great deal of information about any variable of interest, whether the data be clinical, administrative, educational, or research data. To make best use of a descriptive statistic, it is important to know what levels of measurement should be used with the statistic, and what information the statistic can provide. To find out about the most typical case, measures of central tendency are appropriate. To discover whether the variable has a normal distribution, measures of shape should be applied. And to discover the variability about the mean of the variable, measures of dispersion should be used. Finally, percentiles and quartiles are useful for describing the placement of a single case in a population.