research methods: measures of central tendency and dispersion

Question 1

What is the advantage of using a mean?

Answer 1

most sensitive/powerful as it extracts the most information from the scores, because all raw data is used in the calculation

Question 2

What is the disadvantage of using the mean?

Answer 2

It can be greatly effected by extreme scores/ outliers

Question 3

What is the advantage of using the median?

Answer 3

It is not effected by extreme scores

Question 4

What is the disadvantage of using the median?

Answer 4

It is not as informative as the mean as it does not take all raw scores into account

Question 5

What is the advantage of using the mode?

Answer 5

The only measure possible when data is nominal (not numerical)

Question 6

What is the disadvantage of using the mode?

Answer 6

The mode is not applicable in data sets when there are no modes or several modes

Question 7

What do measures of dispersion do?

Answer 7

Examine variability in data sets

Question 8

What do measures of dispersion help us understand?

Answer 8

Whether scores in a data set are very similar or very different i.e. we can see whether there are strong individual differences between participants on particular tasks

Question 9

What is a strength of using the range?

Answer 9

It tells us over how many numbers a distribution is spread

Question 10

What is a limitation of using the range?

Answer 10

Extreme values effect the result

Question 11

What is standard deviation?

Answer 11

A more powerful measure of dispersion as it tells us how far, on average, each score is from the mean

Question 12

What happens the larger the standard deviation?

Answer 12

The larger the standard deviation, the greater the dispersion or spread within a set of data

Question 13

What happens the smaller the standard deviation?

Answer 13

The smaller the standard deviation the more scores are clustered around the mean so the larger the standard deviation is