Introduction

This chapter is intended to act as a review of the basic statistical concepts, knowledge of which is required for the reader to fully appreciate the chapters that follow. It is not designed to act as a substitute for a good grounding in basic statistics but rather as a summary of knowledge that the reader should already possess. For the less confident statistician, we recommend that in reading this and subsequent chapters, that they obtain and read other books on the subject. In particular, we recommend for the completely statistically challenged Statistics without Tears: A Primer for Non-Mathematicians (Rowntree 1991). More confident readers may find books such as those by Howell (1999) and Gujarati (1999, chapters 2–5) to be of particular use.

Data

Data are fundamental to the analysis and modeling of real world phenomena such as consumer and organizational behavior. Understanding data are therefore critical to any study application and nowhere more than to studies involving discrete choice analysis. The data sets which we use, whether collected by ourselves or by others, will invariably be made up of numerous observations on multiple variables (an object that can take on many different values). Only through understanding the qualities possessed by each variable will the analyst be capable of deriving the most benefit from their data.