Descriptive Analysis and Interpretation

This chapter presents a step-by-step data analysis process beginning with data cleaning and preprocessing, which leads to and may include descriptive analyses of all variables. Once the data are clean and final descriptive statistics are completed, inferential statistics (Chap. 7 ) may be leveraged to better understand the practical and statistical significance of the data. The use of exploratory data analysis (Chap. 8 ) at any stage may reveal patterns in the data for subsequent formal hypothesis testing. Interpretation of the analysis is discussed for each of the methods. Your project may employ a number of complementary analysis methods based on study design, the variables representing the PIO MM concepts, and the measures used to operationalize them.