A frequent question for people first learning statistical procedures is how to normalize data. Other terms for normalizing may include standardizing, scaling and centering (though the last two terms may mean something other than the first two terms). In my field (literacy) many of my colleagues work with count data on text data and thus have a need for comparing across data sets. Normalizing data is one means of accomplishing this. A while back I wrote a guide for people in my field to help with normalizing data. Though it was written for them it’s really a good guide for any statistics beginner.
The guide is broken into three parts:
- An introduction to normalizing text data (if you don’t care about this skip on to section two)
- An explanation of the standard score formula (doing it by hand)
- A guide to doing normalization in excel (with pictures)
Normalizing Text Data (Click Here) ← good normalizing guide for anyone not just those who deal with text