Descriptive Statistics Project, Statistics Problem Example

The purpose of this analysis is to summarize the medical characteristics of patients with various blood pressure levels in order to gain an understanding of the relationship between systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure with regards to cholesterol levels, weight, height, and body mass index (BMI). This data will be collected from the local clinic, as these are measurements that are regularly taken by the physicians. Each participant in the study will not be identified by name in order to ensure patient privacy, and will instead be labelled as participants 1 through 20. Each systolic and diastolic blood pressure measurement was taken using a blood pressure monitor, while the total serum cholesterol was analyzed using a blood test. Weight was determined through use of a conventional scale and height was determined using a wall ruler. Both weight and height were taken into consideration to calculate the BMI, which describes the overall body size of each individual.

This project received approval by the university. Care was taken to ensure that all patients’ private information would be protected and that none of the information used in this report could be traced back to them. In order to generate an understanding patient data, the mean, standard deviation, variance, median, and mode was calculated for each variable. The mean and median were then compared to determine whether the data is normally distributed; values with a similar mean and median can be considered to have a normal distribution, while values that are not close can be said to not have a normal distribution. Histograms were generated to support these claims.