Standard Deviation
A measure of spread that expresses how far values in a dataset typically fall from the mean, in the same units as the data.
The standard deviation summarizes how dispersed values are around the mean. It is the square root of the variance, which returns the measure to the original units of the variable. A small standard deviation means observations cluster tightly around the mean; a large one means they are widely scattered. In a normal distribution, roughly 68 percent of values fall within one standard deviation of the mean and about 95 percent within two.
In a thesis, a mean reported without its standard deviation is nearly uninterpretable, since two groups can share a mean yet differ enormously in spread. Report means with standard deviations in your descriptive tables, use them to spot outliers and check assumptions, and remember that standardized effect sizes for group differences are expressed in standard deviation units, so this one statistic underpins much of your results chapter.
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