We may earn an affiliate commission when you visit our partners.

Descriptive Statistics

Save
May 1, 2024 Updated May 8, 2025 18 minute read

Descriptive statistics is a fundamental branch of statistics that focuses on summarizing and describing the main features of a collection of information, or a data set. It provides simple summaries about the sample and the observations that have been made. Think of it as creating a snapshot of your data, allowing you to understand its basic characteristics at a glance. This field is often the first step in any data analysis process, providing a foundation for more complex explorations.

Path to Descriptive Statistics

Take the first step.
We've curated 24 courses to help you on your path to Descriptive Statistics. Use these to develop your skills, build background knowledge, and put what you learn to practice.
Sorted from most relevant to least relevant:

Share

Help others find this page about Descriptive Statistics: by sharing it with your friends and followers:

Reading list

We've selected nine books that we think will supplement your learning. Use these to develop background knowledge, enrich your coursework, and gain a deeper understanding of the topics covered in Descriptive Statistics.
Provides proofs for many of the formulas and theorems used in descriptive statistics.
Provides a detailed overview of descriptive statistics, including measures of central tendency, dispersion, and skewness.
Provides a step-by-step guide to using SPSS, a popular statistical software package, to perform descriptive statistics.
A concise and accessible introduction to descriptive statistics for students in the social sciences.
Covers descriptive statistics as part of a broader introduction to statistics.
Table of Contents
Our mission

OpenCourser helps millions of learners each year. People visit us to learn workspace skills, ace their exams, and nurture their curiosity.

Our extensive catalog contains over 50,000 courses and twice as many books. Browse by search, by topic, or even by career interests. We'll match you to the right resources quickly.

Find this site helpful? Tell a friend about us.

Affiliate disclosure

We're supported by our community of learners. When you purchase or subscribe to courses and programs or purchase books, we may earn a commission from our partners.

Your purchases help us maintain our catalog and keep our servers humming without ads.

Thank you for supporting OpenCourser.

© 2016 - 2025 OpenCourser