Research Methods and Applications for Student Affairs

Chapter TenDescribing Trends

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Understand the purpose and role of descriptive statistics.
• Differentiate between the major types of descriptive statistics.
• Read descriptive statistics in journal articles and reports.
• Evaluate descriptive statistics based on how data are collected, analyzed, and reported.
• Apply interpretations of descriptive statistics to student affairs practice.

Descriptive statistics condense numerical information into interpretable, manageable, and useful summary data. They exchange the context and uniqueness of single data points for the ability to examine trends and tendencies. This concession is a key feature of positivism, which emphasizes data ...