Descriptive summaries are a quick way to prepare a report showing a description of your data that is ready to be inserted directly into a research paper. It is a tool that makes it easy to compile all forms of basic data description in one place.

The Descriptive summaries option settings window is invoked via the menu textsf{Statistics} menu→Summaries→Descriptive summaries.

Depending on how we measure, we usually use one of three types of measures to describe a variable:

• mean ± standard deviation, abbreviated
• median [lower quartile; upper quartile], abbreviated or median [min; max], abbreviated
• the number (percentage) of each category, abbreviated

Depending on the need and fulfillment of additional assumptions

• in the interval scale, data can be described using any measure, in addition, often the researcher wants to check the normality of the distribution of such data,
• in the ordinal scale we have medians (with quartiles or the smallest and the largest value) or counts and percentages of particular categories,
• at the nominal scale, only the counts and percentages of each category.