Central Tendency & Variability Why Is This Important?

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When you analyze data, you may be asked to describe it to others. To do so effectively, you will need to present the key elements of a data set to someone in a manner that makes the point and facilitates decision making. When you analyze data, you may be asked to describe it to others. To do so effectively, you may be asked: What is typical in this situation? What do most people do? How spread out are the responses in this situation?

Data Types

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Psychologists collect various kinds of data. The data could be numerical scores, peoples ranking of some item, or categories such as gender or race. Each type of data goes by a different name. Numerical scores are called: measurement or scale data. Rankings are called: ordinal data Categories such as gender are called: nominal data. You want to be able to summarize each type of data. How to do it? You will learn that to summarize data, you will need to determine: Measures of central tendency: They tell you about the most typical scores. Measures of variability: They tell you about how the scores are spread out.

Shoe Store Example

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Why is knowing this important? Let me tell you why you want to know this kind of information. Lets say that when you graduate, you cant find a job. So you decide to open a small business it will be a running and outdoor shoe store for men. You like the outdoors and an exercise business will fit your interests. You find a location. However, you need stock. You borrow from your Dad enough money to buy 1000 pairs of shoes. To make life easy for this example, lets say we forget about different styles, different widths and half sizes.

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Shoe Store Example < back 4 of 17 next >

What should you buy? What should you stock? Well, I wear size 12 shoes. Should you go buy a 1000 size 12s? Most of you will understand that this is a bad idea. Not that many guys wear size 12s. Someone tells us that the average male shoe size is 9. You go buy 1000 size 9 pairs of shoes. What do you think happens to your store and why?

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Shoe Store Example

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Gosh Darn! (You would probably say something else and your father certainly will). So you ask your Dad for more money to try again. This time, you buy 1100 shoes and spread out your purchases evenly over different shoe sizes.

What do you think will happen this time and why?

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Shoe Store Example

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Why? Lets look at your table of shoes after a few weeks in business. When we had the same number of all the sizes we did not pay attention to the fact that there arent equal numbers of feet at each shoe size. When the store stocked the same number of shoes for all sizes, this did not take into account the fact that there arent equal numbers of feet at each shoe size. Lets look again at the pattern of shoe purchases for an idea of how shoe size is distributed in the population.

It seems that shoe size is normally distributed. What else do you need to know to place a better shoe order for the store? 1. 2. The typical Score - Central Tendency How are the scores spread out - Variability

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How Do We Do This Ourselves?

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Construct a frequency distribution Frequency distributions are graphs with the score on the X-axis and the frequency count on the Yaxis. To estimate how many shoes of different sizes you need in order not to go broke, you would take a large randomly selected sample of men (usually > 120) and measure their feet. Types of Frequency Distributions: Frequency distributions have different characteristics depending on whether the data are nominal vs. ordinal or measurement.

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How Do We Do This Ourselves? Frequency Histogram

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Nominal frequency distributions are constructed as histograms (bar graphs) . Consider the following graph of the number of men and women at your school.

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How Do We Do This Ourselves? Frequency Histogram

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Measurement frequency distributions are constructed as continuous curves. Consider the following graph on shoe size from our sample.

This is a normal curve and the line in the middle is the mean. Many frequency distributions in Psychology are normal (unimodal, symmetric, and bell-shaped) Each box on the graph represents a score.

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How Do We Do This Ourselves? Frequency Histogram

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Additional things to know: Distributions can come in other shapes. Skewed with more scores to the left or right.

Bimodal (also multimodal) with more than one peak.

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How Do We Do This Ourselves? Calculate Measures of Central Tendency

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How do we calculate our measures of central tendency?

Mode: Find the value of the score with the highest frequency. Median: Find the value of the score that divides the distribution in half with 50% of scores above the median and 50% below the median. Mean: Take all the scores, add them up and divide by the total number of scores (N). Formula: (Sum of X/N)

Additional things to know:

The mean is the center of normal distributions. For skewed distributions - report both the mean and median. For normal distributions - the mean, median and mode are equal. The mean is unbiased on the average, sample means arent always too high or too low.

Where are we now! We now can make a frequency distribution and calculate three different measures of central tendency. Now we need measures of variability.

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How Do We Do This Ourselves? Calculate Measures of Variability

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How do we calculate our measures of variability? Range: Substract the lower score in the data set from the highest score. Standard deviation: Calculate deviation scores by subtracting the mean from each score. Square each deviation score and add up the squared deviations. Divide by the total number of scores (N). Take the square root of the average squared deviations.

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Important Points

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The standard deviation is the most commonly used measure of variability with measurement data. The range is subject to extremes. The variance equals the square of the standard deviation. Things to Know: 1. The standard deviation is a landmark on the normal curve. It reaches from the mean to the point of inflection of the normal distribution.The point of inflection is the point at which the curve changes direction. Given the mathematics of the normal curve, there are always 68.26% of the scores between the first standard deviation marks around the mean. So if someone tells you the mean and standard deviation of a distribution, you can tell, the two scores that encompass a little more than 2/3s of your distribution.

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Important Points

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Now lets look again at your shoe data If you had calculated the standard deviation (SD) of the distribution of shoe sizes and found out it was 2.0* you would know that 68.26% of males probably have shoe sizes between 7 and 11. This is 9 + 1 SD or 9 + 2. (Hint: look back at the shoe table with the normal curve in it and figure out the SD visually.)

Now you estimate how many pairs of shoes you might need for each shoe size by filling in the boxes under the curve. Preview: In z-scores you will see how to pin down these percentages even more exactly. < back 14 of 17 next >

Important Points

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Lets apply this to other situations! The mean IQ on the Stanford-Binet IQ test is 100. The Standard Deviation is 16. Thus 68.26% of people have scores between 84 and 116. The mean of the SAT-V is 550 and the SD is 100. Thus 68.26% have scores between 450 and 650. One college reports its SAT-V mean has 600 and its SD is at 50. Another reports it as a mean of 500 and an SD of 100. You know that the first school is higher and less variable than the second is. Additional things to know:

When you calculate the SD deviation from a sample (rather than a population) you divide by N 1 rather than N because sample SDs tend to be too small. The variance is useful later in comparing groups. If you have non-normal distributions, you might have to use the range and the median to summarize the central tendency and variability of the distribution.

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Bottom Line

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If you have a data set, you need to know whats typical and how all the scores are spread out. If you know this, you can better understand the data. We will see how this leads to better prediction and decision making.

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Summary

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Measures of central tendency tell us about the scores that are most typical of a data set. The mean, median, and mode are the most widely used measures of central tendency. Measures of variability tell us how spread out, or dispersed, the scores are in a data set. The range and standard deviation are the most widely used measures of central tendency. The mean and standard deviation are usually used together. They tell us the center point of the data set and the average distance of each score from the center point. The median and range are usually used together. The median tells us the middle score, and the range tells us the distance between the lowest and highest score.

Test your knowledge of this workshop by taking the Workshop Quiz.

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The new project will support the existing companys fish production business as follows: Developing and establishing an integrated cold chain system for the fishery sector in Zailac District which will consist of the following components: Establishing an Ice Production Plant in Zailac town: which will facilitate Haadeyta Fishing Company and other Fishing communities in Zailac to obtain necessary ices for fish product preservation both on board in the boats and inland. The availability of the ice for fishing will increase the quality and quantity of fresh products in Zailac. Haadeyta will get extra profits from the Ice production and will sell the Ice to the other fisheries in Zailac while they benefit availing ice locally. Establishing Cold Storage Plant facilitates: which Haadeyta Fishing Company and other Fishing communities in Zailac to will obtain necessary cold storage facilities. Haadeyta will get extra profits from renting the cold storage for preservation, processing, packaging and quality control services of the fish products for other fisheries in Zailac while they benefit availing cold storage locally. Purchasing an efficient Refrigerated truck for fish product transport to the Markets: This will facilitate Haadeyta Fishing Company and other fisheries to safely transport and market their fresh fish products. Haadeyta will get extra profits from renting other fisheries to safely transport their products to their target markets, while they benefit availing cold storage locally.