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Descriptive Statistics

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A Concise Guide to Market Research

Part of the book series: Springer Texts in Business and Economics ((STBE))

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should understand:

  • The workflow involved in a market research study.

  • Univariate and bivariate descriptive graphs and statistics.

  • How to deal with missing values.

  • How to transform data (z-transformation, log transformation, creating dummies, aggregating variables).

  • How to identify and deal with outliers.

  • What a codebook is.

  • The basics of using IBM SPSS Statistics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are multivariate techniques which consider three, or more, variables simultaneously to detect outliers. See Hair et al. (2010) for an introduction, and Agarwal (2013) for a more detailed methodological discussion.

  2. 2.

    A similar type of chart is the line chart. In a line chart, measurement points are ordered (typically by their x-axis value) and joined with straight line segments.

  3. 3.

    Note that the terms n-1 in the numerator and denominator cancel each other and are therefore not displayed here.

  4. 4.

    The logarithm is calculated as follows: If x = y b, then y = log b (x) where x is the original variable, b the logarithm’s base, and y the exponent. For example, log 10 of 100 is 2. Logarithms cannot be calculated for negative values (such as household debt) and for the value of zero.

  5. 5.

    In the dataset TV_market.sav, the variable quality_3D_rating has −99 defined as missing value, indicating that the rating is not applicable as the corresponding TV does not have 3D functionality.

  6. 6.

    Note that all following analyses will be based on the reduced dataset TV_market_reduced.sav.

  7. 7.

    As we had already introduced box plots in the sections on univariate outlier detection, we do not repeat the discussion here.

  8. 8.

    You can also ask for the covariances to be shown by selecting Cross-product deviations and covariances under Options.

References

  • Agarwal, C. C. (2013). Outlier analysis. New York, NY: Springer.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collier, J. (2010). Using SPSS syntax: A beginner’s guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: the story of success. New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hair, J. F., Jr., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., & Anderson, R. E. (2010). Multivariate data analysis. A global perspective (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harzing, A. W. (2005). Response styles in cross-national survey research: A 26-country study. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 6(2), 243–266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, T., Kulesa, P., Lic, I., Cho, Y. I., & Shavitt, S. (2005). The relation between culture and response styles. Evidence from 19 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 36(2), 264–277.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Little, R. J. A. (1998). A test of missing completely at random for multivariate data with missing values. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 83(404), 1198–1202.

    Article  Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Management, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität, Magdeburg, Germany

    Marko Sarstedt

  2. Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia

    Marko Sarstedt

  3. Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Erik Mooi

  4. Aston Business School, University of Aston, Birmingham, UK

    Erik Mooi

Authors
  1. Marko Sarstedt
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  2. Erik Mooi
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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Sarstedt, M., Mooi, E. (2014). Descriptive Statistics. In: A Concise Guide to Market Research. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-53965-7_5

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