Statistics for Sport and Exercise Studies

CHAPTER 3

DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS

INTRODUCTION

Two main types of statistics are descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. These are often used in a complementary way within quantitative research studies. As the name suggests, ‘descriptive’ statistics describe samples using sample statistics such as averages or frequencies. Descriptive statistics are used within a reductionist research approach whereby we gather data for a sample of individual participants from a population of interest and summarize the sample using descriptive statistics. If a large enough random sample is used, then researchers may generalize the findings for the sample to be relevant to the whole population from which the sample was drawn. Descriptive statistics are ...