Statistics for dental researcher, Part 2: Descriptive statistics

Abstract

Descriptive statistics is the process of summarizing gathered raw data from a research and creating useful statistics, which help the better understanding of data. According to the types of variables, which consist of qualitative and quantitative variables, some descriptive statistics have been introduced. Frequency percentage is used in qualitative data, and mean, median, mode, standard deviation, standard error, variance, and range are some of the statistics which are used in quantitative data. In health sciences, the majority of continuous variables follow a normal distribution. skewness and kurtosis are two statistics which help to compare a given distribution with the normal distribution.