Researchers seldom report their procedures for checking the data, but often do report their summaries and inferential statistics. These questions will help you to evaluate their statistical procedures:

• Does the researcher describe checking the data-for example, is the distribution of scores described or outliers identified?
• Are appropriate summary statistics provided for all variables-for example, are the means, standard deviations, and effect sizes reported?
• Does the researcher present inferential statistics, such as confidence intervals or results of null hypothesis significance testing?