Week 4 Assignment

Reporting descriptive statistics depends on the measurement of the variables. Continuous variables have meaningful descriptive statistics such as means and medians that are not reported in categorical variable which have specific descriptions such as frequency tables that cannot be reported in continuous variables.

This study will utilize Afrobarometer dataset to examine the appropriate descriptive statistics for the two types of variables. Age (Q1) and present living conditions (Q3b) are the two variables used. Age (Q1) is the continuous variable discussed in this study and the descriptive statistics appropriate are as reported in table 1.

Table 1: Descriptive statistics for Age

The analysis shows that the mean, mode, median, standard deviation, variance, range, minimum and maximum values can be reported for a continuous variable. The mean for ages of participants is 37.39 which is approximately 37 years. The median is 34, mode is 30, standard deviation is 14.86, and range is 87 while the minimum and maximum values are 18 and 105 respectively. The measures of central tendency are mean, median and mode. Measures of dispersion include standard deviation, range and variance.

Your present living condition (Q3b) is a categorical variable with 5 levels, 1) Very Bad, 2) Fairly bad, 3) Neither good nor bad, 4) Fairly good and 5) Very good. Categorical variables can be described appropriately using frequency distribution tables such as the one shown in table 2 (Wagner III W., 2020).

Table 2: Frequency table for Q3b

The table showed that 29.2% of the total population reported their present living conditions as fairly bad, 26.0% fairly good, 20.6% neither good nor bad, 20.2% very bad and only 4.1% reported their living condition as very good. Since the variable is ordinal, the mode and standard deviation can be reported as shown in table 3.

Table 3: Descriptive statistics

This shows that the most frequent value is 2 which represents “fairly bad” implying most people reported the living status as fairly bad.

The analysis shows the report of living standards of people in a certain setting. According to the analysis, these people seem to be unhappy with their living conditions. Efforts can be put in place by the government to put in place strategies that will help in raising standards of the living conditions of people in the given area.

Reference

Wagner, III, W. E. (2020). Using IBM® SPSS® statistics for research methods and social science statistics (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.