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3 Measures of Dispersion
In this section, you will study measures of variability
of data. In addition to being able to find measures of
central tendency for data, it is also necessary to
determine how “spread out” the data. Two measures
of variability of data are the range and the
standard deviation.
Measures of variation
n
1. Find mean of data : =i 1 x
n
72 73 76 76 78 75
5
Step 2: Find the deviation of each score from the
mean
x
xx
72 72-75 = -3
73 73–75 = -2
76 76-75 = 1
76 76-75 = 1
78 78-75= 3
Note that
( x x) 0
the sum of
the
deviations =
0
0
The sum of the deviations from mean will always be zero. This
can be used as a check to determine if your calculations are
correct.
Note that _
( x x) 0
Step 3: Square each deviation from the mean. Find the sum of
the squared deviations.
n _
Sample variance is ( x x)2
i
s2 i1
n 1
24 6
= 5 1
The four steps can be combined into one mathematical
formula for the sample standard deviation. The sample
standard deviation is the square root of the quotient of the sum
of the squared deviations and (n-1)
Sample Standard Deviation:
n _
( x x
i)2
=
s i1 6
n 1
Four step procedure to calculate sample standard
deviation:
(x i x) fi
2
s i 1
n 1
Here is the frequency distribution of the number of rounds of golf
played by a group of golfers. The class midpoints are in the second
column. The mean is 29.35 . Third column represents the square of the
difference between the class midpoint and the mean. The 5th column is the
product of the frequency with values of the third column. The final result is
highlighted in red
class midpoint data-mean frequency (x-mean)^2*frequency x*f
squared
(x
75 5191.386667 29.35333
i x) fi
2
8.37579094
s i 1
n 1
Interpreting the standard deviation