Descriptive Statistics are widely used in empirical research in the social sciences, summarize certain features of the data set in a study. The data set nearly always consists of lists of numbers that describe a population. Descriptive statistics are used to summarize the information in the data using simple measures. Thus, descriptive statistics can help to represent large data sets in a simple manner. However, an incautious use of descriptive statistics can lead to a distorted picture of the data by leaving out potentially important details.
Descriptive Statistics. (2008). In W. A. Darity, Jr. (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 311-313). Macmillan Reference USA. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3045300564/GVRL?u=csus_main&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=31619e33
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