Descriptive statistics

Whether you are undertaking qualitative or quantitative research, you will need to describe the characteristics of the population under study. To a large extent, this involves summarising data, as with more than a handful of subjects, it would be too difficult and long-winded to try and describe every individual.

In this section, we cover the basics of describing the data, focusing in particular on asking what is a typical value, and how spread out the data are.