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Copyright

Stuart N. Lane;

Published On

2025-02-25

Page Range

pp. 455–460

Language

  • English

Print Length

6 pages

25. Descriptive statistics

Chapter of: The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research(pp. 455–460)
Descriptive statistics refer to a basic set of measures that can be derived from data to characterize those data. They make statements about the data and not the population from which the data are derived, and this is what distinguishes them from inferential statistics. They are often an entry point in research for generating ideas about your data but are also important for helping to decide what kinds of inferential statistics your research project should use. All descriptive statistics need care, not only because they may not be representative of the population they are describing, but also because statistics have considerable power in environmental management.

Contributors

Stuart Lane

(author)
Professor of Geomorphology at University of Lausanne
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6077-6076

Stuart N. Lane is Professor of Geomorphology at the University of Lausanne. He is a geographer and civil engineer by training who has held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Durham in the U.K. and Lausanne in Switzerland. His work has sought to bring a geographical perspective to contemporary environmental concerns such as flooding and pollution. The primary focus of his current work is the environments created by disappearing glaciers in terms of ice, water, sediment and ecosystems and the consequences of these changes for environmental management. An important thread through his most recent research criticizes the current alignment of geography as a discipline with the ever more neo-liberal academy; and then argues for the rediscovery of a more scientific geographical science better able to cope with the crises the world is experiencing today.