Measures of central tendency and dispersion Flashcards
What are the strengths of the mean?
It’s the most sensitive as it includes all the scores in the data set within calculation. This means it is more representative of the data as a whole.
What are the limitations of the mean?
The mean is easily distorted by extreme values giving an unrepresentative mean.
What are the strengths of the median?
Unlike the mean extreme scores doesn’t affect it.
It’s easy to calculate.
What are the limitations of the median?
It is less sensitive than the mean as the actual values of higher and lower numbers are ignored and extreme values may be important.
What are the strengths of the mode?
Easy to work out.
What are the limitations of the mode?
It’s not very sensitive,.
There may be several modes in a data set.
What is a measure of central tendency?
Are ‘averages’ which gives us information about the most typical values in a data set. There are three to consider: mean, mode and median.
What is a measure of dispersion?
This is how far scores vary and differ from one another. There are two to consider: range and standard deviation.
What are the strengths of range?
Easy to calculate.
What are the limitations of range?
Only takes the highest and lowest score into account, so can be affected by ‘outliers’ (extreme values) making it unrepresentative.
What is standard deviation?
Measures the spread of scores around the mean - average distance of each of the scores from the mean. The higher the standard deviation, the more spread out the scores are, suggesting a large variation in the results. The lower the standard deviation, the more similar all the participant’s scores were.
What are the strengths of standard deviation?
A more precise measure of dispersion than the range.
What are the limitations of standard deviation?
As the mean is being used, it can be affected by extreme values, as the mean has been distorted.
