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Understanding Business Research Terms and Concepts Part 2

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Understanding Business Research Terms and Concepts: Part 2 Justin Wilson RES 351 Business Research 31 Mar 2015 Biman Ghosh Descriptive statistics is the term given to the analysis of data that helps describe, show or summarize data in a meaningful way such that, for example, patterns might emerge from the data. Descriptive statistics do not, however, allow us to make conclusions beyond the data we have analysed or reach conclusions regarding any hypotheses we might have made. They are simply a way to describe our data. Descriptive statistics are very important because if we simply presented our raw data it would be hard to visulize what the data was showing, especially if there was a lot of it. Descriptive statistics …show more content…

Rather, their scores will be spread out. Some will be lower and others higher. Measures of spread help us to summarize how spread out these scores are. To describe this spread, a number of statistics are available to us, including the range, quartiles, absolute deviation, variance andstandard deviation. inferential Statistics We have seen that descriptive statistics provide information about our immediate group of data. For example, we could calculate the mean and standard deviation of the exam marks for the 100 students and this could provide valuable information about this group of 100 students. Any group of data like this, which includes all the data you are interested in, is called a population. A population can be small or large, as long as it includes all the data you are interested in. For example, if you were only interested in the exam marks of 100 students, the 100 students would represent your population. Descriptive statistics are applied to populations, and the properties of populations, like the mean or standard deviation, are called parameters as they represent the whole population (i.e., everybody you are interested in). Often, however, you do not have access to the whole population you are interested in investigating, but only a limited number of data instead. For example, you might be interested in the exam marks of all students in the UK. It is not feasible to measure all exam marks of all students in the whole of the UK so you have to

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