In this video, I'm going to show you how to get descriptive statistics, create a histogram and create a frequency distribution in JASP. So as you can see, here's my data set. It's called health. And I'm just going to pick one variable. I'm going to pick the sodium variable as an example. So let's do descriptive statistics first. So we go up to the menu, we click on descriptives. We're not going to worry about reliability analysis. We're just going to hit descriptive statistics. Then we need to drag the variable over that we're interested in. That's sodium. I can either drag and drop it like this, or I can just highlight it and hit the arrow key.
And then you can see in my preview screen, it's already showing me my results. And it defaults to how many valid values there are, there are 100. There any missing values that were left blank or somehow aren't being read by JASP. The mean, the standard deviation, the minimum value and the maximum value. I can add more to it by clicking down here under statistics. And there are four general categories. We can get percentile values, which we're not going to worry about. Distribution, which talks about the shape of the distribution. We're not going to worry about that either. But we can get different measures of central tendency. You can see the mean is reported, but I can also ask for the median and the mode. And you can see, as I click on those, they show up in the preview panel.
Then I can look for dispersion or spread of the value, how dispersed or how spread out the value is. SE stands for standard error. Standard error of the mean. We're not going to worry about that. It gives you standard deviation. That's already clicked. It gives you the maximum and the minimum. We can ask for the range, the distance from the highest to the lowest value. You can see that's 27. We can also ask for the variance, which you see here is 36.57. So we can ask for those as well. Those are common ones.
We can also ask for a histogram. And that, in JASP, is under plots. So let's click on the plots menu. And a histogram, JASP calls a distribution plot. So we click on that. There's our classic histogram. Now, if I want to show this or put this in homework, I can click on this. Let's see, where is it? Up here under results. And I can copy this entire section and put it in a Word file. I can add a note to it. So I could add a note up here that says assignment 1.1, whatever I want to do. But I tell you, an easy way to record this data is to do this. I want to make the screen a little bigger here so I can capture it all. It is to simply do a screen capture. So in my case, since I'm on a Mac, I hit command, shift, 4, and I can just simply grab all this, and it becomes a screen capture, which is now a file on my hard drive. So that's the descriptive statistics and histograms. Descriptive statistics and histograms.
Now I want to show you how to do a frequency distribution. So with that, in JASP, it's a frequency table, and you can see nominal or ordinal variables. And so you can see up here, where is it, if I cursor up, sodium is not a nominal or ordinal variable. JASP will only give a frequency distribution for nominal or ordinal variables. And this is a ratio variable, and you can see they combined ratio and interval variables together in JASP, and I think they're called measurement or scale variables, and the icon is of a ruler. Ordinal variables are shown as, looks like a pie charts or a graph, with three circles, a visual of three circles. That means it's nominal. So I need to make sodium a nominal variable. So how do I do that?
Well, I need to go back to my data. And to get back to my data, I click on this arrow icon. You can see it says show data. So let's go back to that. And here's sodium with, I think it's called, the scale icon, which means it's either interval or ratio data. I click on that. Yeah, it's called scale data. And I can change it to nominal data. So let's do that. Now let's go back. I want to hide data. So I want to go back to my results here. So I can go back. And you see the histogram has changed because I've changed the type of data. This is still good, but I think it's preferred to show the histogram not as a nominal data. I think it's good to show it as scale data, because if you notice the scale down here, they've got so many numbers here. It all gets kind of smashed together. So I like it in its original form. I don't like changing it to nominal data for the histogram, but to show the frequency distribution I have to.
So I already took a screenshot of it the old way, so I don't need to worry about this data already, because I've already copied it. So I just click on frequency tables, and there it is. There's a frequency distribution. So I see one person had a sodium level of 125, 11 had a sodium level of 135, and then it gives the percent and the cumulative percentage. You don't need to worry too much about valid percent. But the percent and then the cumulative percentage. So that's my frequency table for the sodium variable. Again, in order to do it, I need to change it from scale data to nominal data, and I showed you how to do that. So again, to copy it, again, I'm on a Mac, so I hit control, shift, 4 and I can copy that. And there it is. I can copy that and put it in my homework. And that's all you need to know.