Descriptive statistics give us a quick way to summarize a large set of data gathered from a psychological study.
Raw scores are often arranged into a frequency distribution, either a frequency histogram or frequency polygon.
The central tendency of a distribution can be described by the mode (the most common score)
the median (the middle score), or the mean (the arithmetic average of the scores).
The variability of a distribution can be expressed as the range (the difference between the greatest and least score)
or the standard deviation (a measure of the average difference between the scores and the mean).
Overall, these measures allow us to describe our data in a useful and meaningful way.