POLS 3650 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Multimodal Distribution, Cumulative Frequency Analysis, Summary Statistics
20 Jan 2017
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Chapter 5: modes, medians, and more page #73-93: Modes and modal categories: mode the most frequently occurring score or category in a distribution. Close doesn"t count here, because the mode is always the most frequent score or value: the term bimodal distribution is used to describe variables that have 2 categories of equal or near equal frequency. Many attitudes about emotionally charged social issues have bimodal distributions that is, people either strongly agree or strongly disagree with these issues and very few people have neutral or have mild attitudes on them. Technically, bimodal distribution must have 2 categories with equal frequencies, but we often use this term in situations in which 2 categories clearly dominate in the distribution of the scores. So close does count in defining bimodal in actual statistical applications, but the mode is still the single most common value(s) in the distribution: the mode is an appropriate descriptive statistic for both qualitative and quantitative variables.
