Measures of central tendency

Measures of central tendency

1. Mean

   • Add up all the data and divide by the number of values in the data
   • Useful as it takes all the scores into account, very scientific measure
   • Can be misleading if there are extreme values
   • Interval

2. Mode

   • the most common value (N.B can have more than one mode)
   • Useful when dealing with categories of %s
   • The least valuable measure of central tendency as there can be more than one mode
   • Nominal

3. Median

   • Put all the numbers in size order then find the middle value
   • Can be used on ranked data, useful if there are extreme values
   • Less sensitive than the mean, doesn't work well on a small data set
   • Ordinal