SOAN 3120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Skewness, Standard Deviation, Squared Deviations From The Mean

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SOAN 3120
• Professor: Ryan Broll

Document Summary

Central tendency = most typical, central or common score of a variable. Three measures of central tendency: mode: the most common score, median: the score of the middle case, mean: the average case. Mode, median and mean are 3 different statistics. They report 3 different kinds of information and will have the same value only in certain specific situations: they serve different functions, one we choose to use depends on what we are trying to measure. The vary in terms of: level of measurement considerations, how they define central tendency. Dispersion= variety, diversity, amount of variation between scores. The greater the dispersion of a variable, the greater the range of scores and the greater the differences between scores. Students in a given class tend to differ in their final exam marks. Canadians tend to differ in their incomes. Countries are diverse in their average incomes. Measure of central tendency and dispersion for nominal variables.