Question

What descriptive statistics will be used for preliminary data analysis? This is an example of how the answer would look like.

Example 1: Frequency Distribution table (Numerical description) and Bar Chart for the Gender variable (Graphical description) .   

Example 2: Mean and Standard Deviation (Numerical description) and the histogram and boxplot (Graphical description) for the Age variable .

I did a research project and my hypothetical statement was the mean stress scores for non-traditional students will be significantly different than the mean for traditional students. I used the Independent T-Test.

Answer 1

Suppose X=Stress Scores for non-traditional students, Y=Stress Scores for traditional students

However we want to mention that before applying this test procedure, we have to test whether the observations are coming from normal distribution or not and this is done by draw qq-plot and Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. Moreover we need to test whether two population variances are equal or not. For this we use Bartlett'e test (under normality assumption) or Levne's test (under any distribution).

If the data are not from normal distribution then we use any non-paramatric test procedure. Among these Two sample Mann-Whitney U-test is best.