After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1 State two reasons why it is important to summarize data.

2 Define descriptive statistics and explain how they are used to describe data.

3 Identify and construct tables and graphs for frequency distributions.

4 Identify and appropriately use the mean, median, and mode to describe data.

5 Identify and appropriately use the range, variance, and standard deviation to describe data.

6 Define and apply the empirical rule.

7 Identify and construct graphs used to display group means and correlations.

8 Use Cronbach’s alpha and Cohen’s kappa to estimate reliability.

9 Compute the mean, median, mode, variance, and standard deviation using SPSS.

10 Compute two measures of reliability using SPSS: Cronbach’s alpha and Cohen’s kappa.