1: What if you have an even number of data points? SAS has various ways of estimating this. See the PROC MEANS helpfiles (SAS/STAT 13.2 User’s Guide or the like) if this is important to your analysis. [return]

2: You can ask for both skewness and kurtosis statistics in SAS in the UNIVARIATE module among others. Run “Code07b Univariate descriptives” for an example. [return]

3: A cut-off for skewness is highly debatable –some authors suggest +-1, some +-2. [return]

4: However, the more sophisticated tests have their own dangers, as discussed in Chapter 12. In the case of normality testing, in fact, these tests are usually not used as they are highly flawed because the size of the sample can make them ”see” non-normality even for data that is close to a perfect normal line. [return]