Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics are used to describe the characteristics of a sample drawn from a population; often, when dealing with data about human beings in organizations, it’s not feasible to attain data for the entire population, so instead we settle for what is hopefully a representative sample of individuals from the focal population. Common types of descriptive statistics include counts (i.e., frequencies), measures of central tendency (e.g., mean, median, mode), and measures of dispersion (e.g., variance, standard deviation, interquartile range). Note that descriptive statistics are not tests of statistical significance; for tests of statistical significance, we need to look to inferential statistics (e.g., independent-samples t-test, multiple linear regression).