It is a quantitative summary and allows researchers to view the data as a whole. This normally includes measures of central tendency and a measure of dispersion
Measures of central tendency
Mean, median, mode
Measures of dispersion
these are descriptive statistics that define the spread of data around a central value. This includes the range and standard deviation
Standard deviation
It is a much more informative measure of dispersion and it looks at how far the scores deviate from the mean. If the standard deviation is large then there was a lot of variation around the mean
