SOAN 3120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Interquartile Range, Central Tendency, Quartile
20 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
Useful because they reduce a large amount of data to one single number. Has to do with the most typical, central or common score of a variable. Three measures: mode: most common score, median: the middle case, mean: the average score. Mode, median, and mean are three very different statistics. Vary in terms of: level of measurement considerations, how they define central tendency, often have 3 different values. Dispersion is useful because the greater the dispersion of a variable, the greater the range of scores and the greater the differences between scores. If everyone had the exact same score, there would be 0 dispersion (just a straight line) Examples: student in a given class tend to differ in their final exam marks, canadians tend have different incomes, countries are diverse in the average incomes. Americans have higher incomes than canadian (49k vs 40k in 2011) Can be used with variable at all three levels of measurement.
