Whether for research or business, almost everyone runs descriptive statistics to begin their analyses.  For this reason, I wrote the guide below to running descriptive statistics in Jamovi.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at MHoward@SouthAlabama.edu!

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Descriptive Statistics are numerical indicators that detail certain aspects of your data.  These may include mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation, and so forth.  We often want to run descriptive statistics to (a) obtain an initial understanding of our data (b) and ensure that our data is correct.  For instance, imagine that we collected data and calculated the mean of a variable labeled “Age.”  The resultant value was 21.  We could then assume that our sample was fairly young – perhaps college students.  But what if the mean value was 1998?  Then we would assume that the variable was coded as “year of birth”  Even yet, what if the mean value was 10,000?  We could probably assume that something is wrong with our data.  So, just from the mean, we can know a lot about our data.

Now, let’s learn how to calculate descriptive statistics in Jamovi.  To begin, open your data in Jamovi.  If you don’t have a dataset, just copy or type the data below.  To change the label from “A” to “Numbers” in Jamovi, double click the title of the column.  You can then replance “A” with “Numbers”, and then click the arrow pointing up in a circle.

Also, the pictures below are a little small on the page. Click on the link above each picture to view a larger version of the picture in a new window.

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When you open your data in Jamovi, it should look something like this:

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Once you have your data open, click on the Exploration button.

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From here, there is only one option, which is Descriptives.

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Now you should get a screen that looks like the following:

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To calculate our descriptive statistics, we are going to click on our variable of interest (Numbers).  We are then going to click the arrow pointing right next to the “Variables” box.

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As you’ll see on the right-hand side of your window, Jamovi automatically calculates our descriptive statistics when we move our variable over to this box.  Neat!

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But there is one last thing that we need to do.  This automatically gives mean and median values, but (most of the time) we are also interested in standard deviation.  To calculate standard deviation, too, first click on the button seen below:

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In this new menu that pops open, you want to click on the Std. deviation button.

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And voilà!  We now have mean, median, and standard deviation for our variables.  Neat!

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From these results, we can see that the mean and the median were both 5.5 for our data.  The standard deviation was 3.028.  If we wanted to, we could also calculate the mode, skewness, and kurtosis values by clicking other options in the pop open menu (similar to how we calculated standard deviation).

Hopefully you were able to get the same results that I did. If not, try to go back from the beginning and start again.  If you still can’t get it to work, feel free to email me at MHoward@SouthAlabama.edu and I can try to help.  Or, feel free to email me if you have any questions about Jamovi!