Calculating Descriptive Statistics

The first thing that you learn in a basic statistics course is how to find the descriptive statistics of sample data.  The descriptive statistics for a sample tell researchers a great deal about the nature of a sample set. Not only can you get a sense of the basic characteristics of a sample, you can use that information to compare the sample to other samples or information from a population.  The following are the basic descriptive statistics that are extracted from data.

• Median – The middle value of the sample.
• Mode – The most common value in the sample. 
• Mean – The average value of the sample.
• Standard Deviation – This value represents the dispersion of the values in the sample. 

The following video demonstrates how to use these definitions, and associated formulas, to find the descriptive statistics of a sample. 

It is quite common to use technology to do all the number crushing that statistical analysis requires.  The following spreadsheet will calculate the descriptive statistics for a data set: 

The following video demonstrates how to use the Excel sheet above to find descriptive statistics for a sample.

This video demonstrates how to create your own formulas in Excel to calculate descriptive statistics from a sample:

There are a wide variety of free online statistics calculators available.  Here’s one that you can use to calculate descriptive statistics for a sample.   

Here a quick tutorial: