You descriptive statistics should be presented in a summary table, including two rows, one for the measures of central tendency and one measures of dispersion and two column one for each group or condition in your experiment.

You will need to decide which descriptive statistics are most suitable for the data you have collected. This is an important decision, see pages below.

Your table should be very carefully labelled. Imagine the reader has not looked at any other page in your report, would they understand what the hypothesis was from reading your row and column headings? If you just say things like “smashed” and “bumped” this is not very clear, instead you should help the reader to understand exactly what each level of the independent variables involved. Also, make sure you include units for the dependent variable.

Measures of Central Tendency

Measures of Dispersion

Distributions: Normal and Skewed

The Graph