Statistics for dental researchers: descriptive statistics

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 andquantitative variables, some descriptive statistics have been introduced. Frequency percentage is used in qualitativedata, and mean, median, mode, standard deviation, standard error, variance, and range are some of the statistics whichare 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.