A frequency distribution is a summary of how often different scores occur within a sample of scores.
For example, let?s suppose that you are collecting data on how many hours of sleep college students get each night. After conducting a survey of 30 of your classmates, you are left with the following set of scores:
7, 5, 8, 9, 4, 10, 7, 9, 9, 6, 5, 11, 6, 5, 9, 10, 8, 6, 9, 7, 9, 8, 4, 7, 8, 7, 6, 10, 4, 8
In order to make sense of this information, you need to find a way to organize the data. A frequency distribution is commonly used to categorize information so that it can be interpreted quickly in a visual way. In our example above, the number of hours each week serves as the categories and the occurrences of each number are then tallied.
Using the information from a frequency distribution, researchers can then calculate the mean, median, mode, range and standard deviation. Frequency distributions are often displayed in a table format (as you can see in the example found below), but they can also be presented graphically using a histogram.
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A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |Example of a Frequency Distribution
| Hours of Sleep Each Night | Frequency |
| 4 | 3 |
| 5 | 3 |
| 6 | 4 |
| 7 | 5 |
| 8 | 5 |
| 9 | 6 |
| 10 | 3 |
| 11 | 1 |
| Total | 30 |
