Sociology 2205A/B Lecture 3: Week 2 (Ch 2)

• School: Western University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: Sociology 2205A/B
• Professor: Jonathan Amoyaw

Document Summary

Central tendency = most typical number, average, central, or common score of a variable. Three measures of central tendency: mode the most common score. Ordinal level variable: median the score of the middle/central case. Ordinal level variable: mean the average of the score. Take all the scores and add them and divide them by the number of scores. Mode, median, and mean are three different statistics: report three different kinds of information and will have the same value only in certain specific situations, they vary in terms of: 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: the taller curve has less dispersion, the flatter curve has more dispersion. Examples: 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.