Reporting Standard Deviation and Interquartile Range
In many journals, especially those following APA style, the symbol SD is used for the sample standard deviation.
Just as the mean and standard deviation are reported together as descriptive measures of central tendency and variability, so too are the median and interquartile range. These measures can be presented in a table or in a graph called a Box Plot. A basic box plot also includes the range of scores from the minimum X to maximum X values.
More on Box Plots
The plot has three basic features: a box, a horizontal line through the box, and vertical lines that are often called “whiskers.” The height of the box reflects the interquartile range, so that the bottom of the box corresponds to the X value for Q1 and the top of the box corresponds to the X value for Q3. The horizontal bar through the box is placed at the value for the median. The vertical whiskers signify the range of scores, so that the bottom and top show the lowest and highest scores, respectively, in the distribution.