Descriptive statistics

Question 1

what are the measures of central tendency?

Answer 1

mean, median, mode

Question 2

what are the advantages of the mean?

Answer 2

-you don’t have to order the data

-usefulfor comparison

-takes all values into account

Question 3

what are the disadvantages of the mean?

Answer 3

-often gives a decimal number which
can be meaningless

-can be skewed due to outliers

Question 4

what are the advantages of the median?

Answer 4

-not affected by outliers

-when combined with the mean, it can be highly descriptive

Question 5

what are disadvantages of the median?

Answer 5

-must order the numbers from least to greatest

-the way you find a median differs -based on the number of scores

Question 6

what are the advantages of the mode?

Answer 6

-you don’t have to order the data

-you do not have to do any calculations

Question 7

what are the disadvantages of the mode?

Answer 7

-it is possible to have no mode, one mode or many modes

-not a great descriptor as there is no guarantee that the mode reflects the whole data sets