ENG101: College Writing (Nadeau): Home

According to the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, a trend is a relatively smooth and unidirectional pattern in data that arises from the accumulation of information over time. Many of the time series in economics and in other social sciences exhibit a smooth (upward or downward) tendency.

For instance, the time series of the U.S. population has an upward trend over time because the number of births exceeds the number of deaths and/or because the number of immigrants exceeds the number of emigrants.