Descriptive Statistics Overview.pptVIP

Central tendency Seeks to provide a single value that best represents a distribution Central tendency Central tendency Central tendency Central tendency Seeks to provide a single value that best represents a distribution Typical measures are mode median mean Mode the most frequently occurring score value corresponds to the highest point on the frequency distribution Mode The mode is not sensitive to extreme scores. Mode a distribution may have more than one mode Mode there may be no unique mode, as in the case of a rectangular distribution Median the score value that cuts the distribution in half (the “middle” score) 50th percentile Median Mean this is what people usually have in mind when they say “average” the sum of the scores divided by the number of scores Mean Mean a symmetrical distribution exhibits no skewness in a symmetrical distribution the Mean = Median = Mode Measures of central tendency Distributions Center: mode, median, mean Shape: symmetrical, skewed Spread Measures of Spread the dispersion of scores from the center a distribution of scores is highly variable if the scores differ wildly from one another Three statistics to measure variability range interquartile range variance Range largest score minus the smallest score these two have same range (80) but spreads look different says nothing about how scores vary around the center greatly affected by extreme scores (defined by them) Interquartile range the distance between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile Q3-Q1 = 70 - 30 = 40 Q3-Q1 = 52.5 - 47.5 = 5 effectively ignores the top and bottom quarters, so extreme scores are not influential dismisses 50% of the distribution Deviation measures Might be better to see how much scores differ from the center of the distribution -- using distance Scores further from the mean have higher deviation scores Deviation measures To see how ‘deviant’ the distribution is relative to another, we could sum these scores But this wou