To get a firm grasp on a set of data generally requires several descriptive statistics and a method of visualization. Two very different data sets may have the same values for certain descriptive stat...To get a firm grasp on a set of data generally requires several descriptive statistics and a method of visualization. Two very different data sets may have the same values for certain descriptive statistics while differing for others. A good place to start is to see how the data is distributed. Frequency and relative frequency distributions are quite common and informative.