PSYC 212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Central Tendency, Mexican Peso
20 Sep 2016
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What does average mean: our goal is to find one value that best represents an entire group of scores. This is what we call our measure of central tendency: option one: mean. The mean is probably what you think of when you hear average . It is the arithmetic average of all the scores. M is how we denote the sample mean (or, x-bar). The population mean is written as (greek letter mu) X tells us to sum up ( ) all the individual scores (xs) N represents the size of our sample (i. e. how many values/observations we have) Can only be used with continuous variables: option two: median. When the mean is influenced by extreme scores (called outliers), the median may be a better representation of the average score. Take the two middle numbers, at them together, divide by 2 (( (m1+m2)/2)) Can only be used with continuous variables: option three: mode.
