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Descriptive and Inferential Statistics

When analysing data, such as the marks achieved by 100 students for a piece of coursework, it is possible to use both descriptive and inferential statistics in your analysis of their marks. Typically, in most research conducted on groups of people, you will use both descriptive and inferential statistics to analyse your results and draw conclusions. So what are descriptive and inferential statistics? And what are their differences?

Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics is the term given to the analysis of data that helps describe, show or summarize data in a meaningful way such that, for example, patterns might emerge from the data. Descriptive statistics do not, however, allow us to make conclusions beyond the data we have analysed or reach conclusions regarding any hypotheses we might have made. They are simply a way to describe our data.

Descriptive statistics are very important because if we simply presented our raw data it would be hard to visualize what the data was showing, especially if there was a lot of it. Descriptive statistics therefore enables us to present the data in a more meaningful way, which allows simpler interpretation of the data. For example, if we had the results of 100 pieces of students' coursework, we may be interested in the overall performance of those students. We would also be interested in the distribution or spread of the marks. Descriptive statistics allow us to do this. How to properly describe data through statistics and graphs is an important topic and discussed in other Laerd Statistics guides. Typically, there are two general types of statistic that are used to describe data:

When we use descriptive statistics it is useful to summarize our group of data using a combination of tabulated description (i.e., tables), graphical description (i.e., graphs and charts) and statistical commentary (i.e., a discussion of the results).

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Inferential Statistics

We have seen that descriptive statistics provide information about our immediate group of data. For example, we could calculate the mean and standard deviation of the exam marks for the 100 students and this could provide valuable information about this group of 100 students. Any group of data like this, which includes all the data you are interested in, is called a population. A population can be small or large, as long as it includes all the data you are interested in. For example, if you were only interested in the exam marks of 100 students, the 100 students would represent your population. Descriptive statistics are applied to populations, and the properties of populations, like the mean or standard deviation, are called parameters as they represent the whole population (i.e., everybody you are interested in).

Often, however, you do not have access to the whole population you are interested in investigating, but only a limited number of data instead. For example, you might be interested in the exam marks of all students in the UK. It is not feasible to measure all exam marks of all students in the whole of the UK so you have to measure a smaller sample of students (e.g., 100 students), which are used to represent the larger population of all UK students. Properties of samples, such as the mean or standard deviation, are not called parameters, but statistics. Inferential statistics are techniques that allow us to use these samples to make generalizations about the populations from which the samples were drawn. It is, therefore, important that the sample accurately represents the population. The process of achieving this is called sampling (sampling strategies are discussed in detail in the section, Sampling Strategy, on our sister site). Inferential statistics arise out of the fact that sampling naturally incurs sampling error and thus a sample is not expected to perfectly represent the population. The methods of inferential statistics are (1) the estimation of parameter(s) and (2) testing of statistical hypotheses.

We have provided some answers to common FAQs on the next page. Alternatively, why not now read our guide on Types of Variable?

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