In statistics, a central tendency (or, more commonly, a measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. It may also be called a center or location of the distribution. Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages.
Whenever you collect data, you end up with a group of scores on one or more variables. If you take the scores on one variable and arrange them in order from lowest to highest, what you get is a distribution of scores. Researchers often want to know about the characteristics of these distributions of scores, such as the shape of the distribution, how spread out the scores are, what the most common score is, and so on. One set of distribution characteristics that researchers are usually interested in is central tendency.
This set consists of the mean, median, and mode. The mean is probably the most commonly used statistic in all social science research.
Whenever you collect data, you end up with a group of scores on one or more variables. If you take the scores on one variable and arrange them in order from lowest to highest, what you get is a distribution of scores. Researchers often want to know about the characteristics of these distributions of scores, such as the shape of the distribution, how spread out the scores are, what the most common score is, and so on. One set of distribution characteristics that researchers are usually interested in is central tendency.
This set consists of the mean, median, and mode. The mean is probably the most commonly used statistic in all social science research.
No comments:
Post a Comment